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Thunderbolt Storage for ESXi

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Screen Shot 2015-01-20 at 9.11.51 PMA question that I frequently receive is whether ESXi supports Thunderbolt-based storage devices. This is especially interesting for folks running ESXi on an Apple Mac Mini due to the limited number of IO connections the Mac Minis' have. If you look on VMware's HCL, you will not find any supported Thunderbolt Storage devices nor are there any that are being actively tested with ESXi, at least as far as I know.

Having said that, generally speaking from an ESXi host point of view, the Thunderbolt interface is just seen as an extended PCIe bus. This means that whatever storage device is connected on the other end can work with ESXi as long as there is a driver in ESXi that can communicate with that devices. This is analogous to having a RAID card and having the proper device driver on ESXi to see its storage.

Even though VMware is not actively testing Thunderbolt-based storage devices, there are a few folks out in the community who have and have been successful. I wanted to share these stories with the community for those that might be interested in this topic and hopefully others who have had similar success can also share more details about their setup.

UPDATE (09/12/16) - ESXi Thunderbolt Driver to Fibre Channel Storage from ATTO

Disclaimer: All solutions listed below are from the community and decisions to purchase based on these solutions will be at your own risk. I hold no responsibility if the listed solutions do not work for whatever reason.

Solution #1 - Pegaus R6 Thunderbolt Storage Enclosure

This was the first Thunderbolt storage device that I had ever seen confirmed publicly to work with ESXi after installing a STEX driver VIB. You can find more details here.

Solution #2 - Sonnet Echo Express III-R Rackmount Thunderbolt 2 Expansion Chassis & RacMac Mini Enclosure

This next solution was recently shared with me from Marc Huppert who has recently expanded his home lab. Marc combined a Thunderbolt expansion chassis with a Mac Mini chassis to exposed Fibre Channel storage to his Mac Minis. You can find more details here.

Solution #3 - xMac Mini Server Enclosure

I came across this solution while searching online which also uses another Mac Mini Thunderbolt expansion chassis connected to Fibre Channel based storage. You can find more details here.

Solution #4 - Sonnet xMac Pro Server Enclosure

Thanks to Joshua for sharing his solution. You can find more details in the comments here.

Solution #5 - LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt drives

Thanks to Philip for sharing his solution. You can find more details in the comments here.

Solution #6 - ARC-8050T2 Thunderbolt 2 RAID

Thanks to Jason for sharing his solution. You can find more details in the comments here.

Solution #7 - Another Sonnet xMac Pro Server Enclosure + EMC VNX

Thanks to Johann for sharing his solution. You can find more details here.

Solution #8 - LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 with 2013 Mac Pro w/ESXi 6.0

Thanks to Thomas for sharing his solution. You can find more details here.

Solution #9 - Sonnet Echo Express III with Mac Pro 6,1 and ATTO ExpressSAS H680 w/ESXi 6.0

Thanks to Grasshopper for sharing details here and here.

Solution #10 - OWC ThunderBay 4 RAID 4-Bay External Drive w/Dual Thunderbolt 2

Thanks to Gregg Green for sharing his use of the Thunderbay with Mac Mini 2012

If there are other Thunderbolt-based storage devices that you or others have had success with ESXi, feel free to leave a comment with details and I will add it to the post. If there are any Thunderbolt storage device vendors that would like to send me a demo unit, I would be more than happy to give the system a test to see if it works with ESXi 🙂

Running ESXi 5.5/5.5u1 on Apple Mac Mini + Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter Caveat

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I just upgraded my Apple Mac Mini 5,3 this morning from ESXi 5.1 Update 1 to the latest ESXi 5.5 release and I am very happy to report the upgrade worked flawlessly! When ESXi 5.5 is generally available, you will be able to just download the ISO and install or upgrade your existing Mac Mini without requiring additional drivers for the on-board network adapter to function correctly. If you have a Mac Mini 6,2 the old SMC issue has been resolved, but the PSOD issue is still occurring. As promised to some folks on Twitter, here is a custom ESXi 5.5 ISO for Mini 6,2 that you can just download and install without any manual intervention:

The only issue that I found is if you are using the Apple Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter, you will find that after the install/upgrade, the network adapter no longer shows up. Looking into this issue, it looks like with the release of ESXi 5.5 and the introduction of the new Native Driver architecture, it had a slight impact to the Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter. Having said that, the Apple Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter and Mac Mini was never officially supported, so we were actually lucky that it had worked in the first place.

The reason the Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter is not being recognized is that its device ID (14e4:1682) is not in tg3 (Broadcom) map file /etc/vmware/driver.map.d/tg3.map. If the device was officially supported, then it would have been automatically claimed by the vmkdevmgr which handles both vmklinux and Native Driver devices. The fix is actually quite simple and I have created a custom VIB called vghetto-apple-thunderbolder-ethernet.vib which will add the appriorpiate device ID to a new custom map file called /etc/vmware/driver.map.d/apple.map which will not collide with the existing tg3.map file. The reason for needing a custom VIB versus appending the device ID to something like /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh is that when the script runs it is too late from a networking stack point of view.

To install the custom VIB, you will need to upload it to your ESXi datastore and run the following command:

esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/[DATASTORE]/vghetto-apple-thunderbolder-ethernet.vib -f

Now you can either use the vSphere Web/C# Client to verify the Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter is showing up or you can run esxcli network nic list.

Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter in Apple Mac Mini on ESXi 5

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If you followed Apple's recent announcement at their WWDC conference then you would know that they just released a Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter. So, why am I talking about this? Well if you are running ESXi 5 on an Apple Mac Mini like me, then you are probably wondering if you can get another network interface on the Mini as it only has a single network adapter. The answer is YES!

To get ESXi 5 to recognize the Thunderbolt adapter, you will need to download and install an additional Broadcom driver (tg3 3.123b.v50.1) or you can create a customized ISO with the driver built in using the steps outlined here for a new installation.

UPDATE (12/21): A custom ESXi ISO is no longer needed, you can use ESXi 5.0 Update 2 which includes the necessary driver to support Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter. Please take a look at this article here for the details.

If you are just installing the driver on an existing ESXi 5 installation, extract the offline bundle and upload to your ESXi host and run the following command:

esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/mini-local-datastore-1/tg3-3.123b.v50.1-offline_bundle-682322.zip

Here is the output from ESXCLI on how ESXi sees the Thunderbolt adapter:

As you can see, it shows up with no description for the device and this is the same when running lspci, it just shows up as a network controller from Broadcom. This is not a big deal, but I assume this has something to do with the high numbering of the vmnic instead of being vmnic1 it's vmnic32.

I also performed some basic network testing by yanking the ethernet cable on the onboard network adapter and ensured traffic continued to flow and vice versa with the other Thunderbolt adapter. Everything works beautifully and now you can have some network redundancy built into your Mac Mini or if you need the throughput for all those VMs you plan on running 😉

Big thanks to Randy K. for hooking me up with a Thunderbolt adapter!