PRIMERGY CX400 M1 CIB - VMWare

[moorken]

Dears, in one of our remote offices we have received our PRIMERGY CX400 M1 Cluster in a Box setup. i took over responsibilities for this system from somebody who left the company. i can find some info for this system being preconfigured with windows server (all lot of documentation tells me it should be preconfigured, however, when i boot up one of the nodes, its basically empty.....) anyway, we would like to set up a VMWare environment on this with 2 x ESXi nodes making use of the shared storage, is this possible? and is there any documentation available for this? unfortunately i don't seem to find much info back around this topic..... thanks!

[me@work]

That's way too few information provided in order to allow for a reasonable response, I'm afraid...

You might want to prefer to get in contact with your supplier, and ask them for a quote to set up the system according to your request...

First thing they're going to ask is probably "what kind of shared storage do you find attached to your CX400, and how's it attached to the nodes?" That's simpy because the disks inserted in the CX400 chassis' front are dedicated in groups directly to the nodes, and do not form some kind of shared storage available to all nodes directly, as you might hope for (but that's only an assumption on my side, I admit).

A certain kind of ESXi installation (with appropriate license, of course) could form a vSAN using these node-local disks (if configured & laid out appropriately), but that's a completely different story...
Plus, you'd need three instead of two nodes for such a vSAN config. OK, the third one might be external, but, well, ...

[moorken]

Thanks. i could find on the internet the manuals for the dedicated disk groups in which each node gets 6 disks assigned, however, i don't think this is the case for our "Cluster in the Box" system? for the "regular" CX400 M1 i find information that every server gets 6 disks assigned, but in our case there are only 18 diskslots and on the left and right side we have some kind of controller cards (for the shared storage?). all disks are visible to the 2 server nodes too. Also, if i go in the bios to the disk controller, i don't find back any option to create any RAID set, does this mean we can only build a software RAID?
i'm aware on the requirements for a VSAN setup, we work with a virtual witness node in our main datacenter....

[me@work]

Ahh, yes, now I see...
The configuration option with SAS expanders (the modules in the box's front) and SAS controllers (in the nodes, without RAID options), allowing all nodes to actually "see" all the disks concurrently, appears to be intended for Windows Storage Server use only.

With an ESXi installed on the nodes' SATADOMs, you might be able to set up a vSphere/vSAN configuration, if the mass storage subsystem would allow for a dedication of disks (or disk slots) to specified nodes, I reckon.

Unfortunately, I personally don't have the required specs & docs available, sorry.

Unless someone who already "converted" this box to vSphere would like to share her/his experience with the process here in the forum, your only options would be to try for yourself, or get in contact with Fujitsu support directly, I'm afraid, as they probably hold the details for capabilities of the hardware components built into the box.

PS:
I assume you already found these ressources in the web (as mentioned: Windows aimed)
- https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publicat ... x400-m.pdf
- http://manuals.ts.fujitsu.com/file/1185 ... umm-en.pdf (chapter 14)
- http://manuals.ts.fujitsu.com/file/1273 ... orm-en.pdf
- http://manuals.ts.fujitsu.com/file/1273 ... -ug-en.pdf