Oracle VM and SATA

I recently picked up again on Oracle VM. Some years ago I have been working on Oracle VM and now a new project is coming up which will involve a lot of virtualization with Oracle VM.

Due to the fact I would love to play with it at home I purchased some new hardware to build my own Oracle VM instance. Issue is that Oracle VM is build for high end enterprise solutions and the drivers which are compiled into the kernel do contain almost only high end enterprise drivers. As it turns out the SATA drivers for my Asus board where not included.

The issue arrises when you try to install the Oracle VM server. The moment you need to select a media to install the Oracle VM on the installer is not showing you your SATA disks. The solution was quite simple, at least on my mainboard which is a ASUS P7P55D-E. When you enter the BIOS you set your SATA disks on AHCI instead of SATA (or RAID). After you set this and reboot the machine the Oracle VM installer will be able to find your drives. Reason for this is that AHCI drivers are in the main kernel of Oracle VM server (version 2.2.1).

The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is a host controller interface defined by Intel which defines the operation of Serial ATA (SATA) host bus adapters in a non-implementation-specific manner. The specification describes a system memory structure for computer hardware vendors to exchange data between host system memory and attached storage devices. As of June 2008[update], the current version of the specification is v. 1.3. AHCI gives software developers and hardware designers a standard method for detecting, configuring, and programming SATA/AHCI adapters. AHCI is separate from the SATA 3Gb/s standard, although it exposes SATA's advanced capabilities (such as hot-plugging and native command queuing) such that host systems can utilize them.