So I'm using ESXi 5.1. My system is an HP C7000 blade chassis with ProLiant BL620c G7 Blades. My storage is P2000 G3 SAS. They are connected via HP 6G Virtual SAS Switch in the back of the chassis.
I'm using HPs ISO for ESXi as it has all of the drivers, tools etc for their hardware. ESXi can see everything, from our FLEX ethernet fabric, the internal storage raid card of the blade as well as the P2000 through the SAS Switch. I've created a 2.18TB LUN and mapped it to my ESXi blade. The ESXi host can see the LUN fine when adding new storage.
Going through the process on creating a datastore on that LUN fails. It says "Unable to create filesystem: Connection timed out".
Attached is an imgur gallery with some screenshots to show you
Attached also, via pastebin, is the VMKernel log obtained from the console showing the initialization of the HPSA driver, it finds both the blades internal raid array (Where ESXi is installed) And the P2000 G3 SAS.
My error log then goes to say that the LUN (And I know its talking about the right thing, the LUNS naa. number matches that from the P2000) has no FS driver assigned, that the operation is not supported, then precedes to log a bunch of illegal command remarks.
HPSA Init: http://pastebin.com/9NSBgS0p
HPSA Errors: http://pastebin.com/8G2aFGRE
I have other LUNs on my P2000 attached to other blades running Ubuntu 12.04, they can mount and write filesystems on them fine. Also this is not a very active system at the moment, so "bandwidth" is not an issue.
The weird thing is, the first time I went to create the VMFS-5 Datastore, it says the LUN is empty (blank), expected of course. Running through the VMFS-5 fails.. odd, so I tried it again, this time, it seems to actually think that VMFS-5 was partitioned on the LUN (you can see I highlighted this in one of the pictures), but obviously it failed.. so it seems that it did at least, start to write something to the P2000.
I'm positive all this hardware is supported, I can see my array controllers, everything else works, Sensor readings, VAAi hardware acceleration is noted to being supported on my LUNs, but some errors in the log seem to think that no FS driver actually exists.
Any suggestions?