When installing ESX/ESXi 4.x or 5.x to a physical server, the local SAS drive appears as a remote storage (1027819)

Symptoms

• When installing ESX/ESXi to a physical server, the local Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive appears as a remote storage
• The installer presents the local SAS drives as remote storage

Resolution

The ESX/ESXi installer always marks a Fibre Channel storage as remote and Serial ATA (SATA) disks as local.

A Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) card is marked as local only if the installer finds its corresponding identifier in the installation driver file. Otherwise, it assumes that the SAS card is remote.

Though the SAS card appears to be remote, you can still select and use it.

Note: If you select remote and are using ESX, the scratch partition is created automatically. To create a persistent scratch location for ESXi, see Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi (1033696).

Additional Information

When trying to install ESX/ESXi via the kickstart method, the kickstart install may fail with this message:

no suitable disk was found

Caution: A genuine remote storage LUNs should be masked or disconnected from the host before performing the kickstart install or you may overwrite a datastore.

To resolve this issue, specify this option in the kickstart file:

--firstdisk=remote

Source:-

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1027819