Blackforce is right - most people (myself included) trying to use sata drives are trying to get by on the cheap.

SCSI is expensive but incredibly reliable and the cost of scsi has gone down considerably over the years.

The problem with scsi is once you start talking about large capacity drives ... get out your wallet.

But you have to consider that scsi drives are build for the datacenter and not the home lab.

So quit crying and get out your wallet if you don't like treading through the mud

Q. What is the performance like and are you using the sata controller build right into the motherboard straight out of the box?

I've read where the LSI cards are working with SATA but your indicating that you have no additional raid controller.

That is the case.  ESX 3.5 ships with drivers that allow it to recognise SATA controllers from the nVidia MPC, Intel ICH, Silicon Graphics series.  There a list of what community members have tested here - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3.5/Whiteboxes_SATA_Controllers_for_ESX_3.5_3i.htm.  These aren't supported, but work great for test systems and it sure beats using SCSI.   Performance on these are fair to poor. 

Q. Correct me if I'm wrong but you also indicated that you have your ESX server core OS and your data store on the same drive?

That would be awesome if possible.

That is the case with either these working SATA controllers or with supported controllers as well.

seems you`re running in ICH7, not in LSI mode.

check the manual again - some boards are a little bit "magic" with this, since they can access the harddisks in two different "flavours", depending on what you have set in the bios

Hi Stive,

As Devzero mentioned the settings you are running look to be in the Intel ICHR7 chipset. I believe there is a jumper set on the right hand side of the MB adjacent the RAM slots. The manual will specify what one to set it to. You can use either the Intel Intel Matrix Storage or the LSI Megaraid  Storage Manager. You can't run both. Once you change this over you will need to recreate the raid again and reintall ESX.

How do you find this board for performance? I am buying the P5BV/SAS board (Almost identical) very shortly for an ISCSI target for HA and VMotion from my two other boxes.

Cheers

>Or have you all your Disk on the SAS Ports?

for sure you need to attach the disks to the sas ports !

so - you have 2 different bios, one of that is lsi megaraid - but there is no onboard sas ports ?

what`s the lsi chipset of your motherboard ?

See the bottom of the list here for what others have tested - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3.5/Whiteboxes_SATA_Controllers_for_ESX_3.5_3i.htm.  I suspect you'l also be Ok with the MegaRAID 150-6 and maybe other Adapter 2x10SA models.  If you find a model you want to try, look at the PCI id files in /etc/vmware/pciid to see what ESX will be able to recognize.

Hi,

Riddle me this Batman...Maybe I'm missing something obvious. 

I'm dinking around with a Sun U40, (older one, not M2).  Trying to install ESX 3.5 Update 1, onto its SATA disks.

It's exhibiting odd behavior under ESX.   

For some reason the boot disk will NOT show up in /proc/partitions.   The other disks they show up fine, which tells me its not a PCI ID mis-match.  (The relevant PCI ID's 0054, and 0055 are in sata_nv.xml by default, no subtituion tricks required)

Tried reducing the drives down to just two disks, and doesn't matter which ports they're plugged into.   The boot disk doesn't show up, the other one does. 

Obviously this makes mounting root rather difficult during boot as the kernel doesn't find the UUID anywhere.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks, 

David