Scratch partition on SATA SSD's on supported SAS controller

[rl11]

Hi all,

I'm looking at building my own ESXi 5.1 server for home study. This box will have a LSI MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i SAS controller, with 2 x SATA SSD's configured as RAID 1.

However I have just noticed the following statement on the ESXi hardware requirements...

"For Serial ATA (SATA), a disk connected through supported SAS controllers or supported on-board SATA controllers. SATA disks will be considered remote, not local. These disks will not be used as a scratch partition by default because they are seen as remote."

Ref: http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.install.doc_50%2FGUID-DEB808...

I had read somewhere that this may not be the case for SATA SSD drives connected to a SAS controller, and that ESXi would create a scratch on the SATA SSD drives / array.

Does anyone know for sure?

Thanks,

[jfrappier]

I believe this is correct (though my lab is off right now and headed to the vBrownBag), though you can MANUALLY configure the scratch partition on the disk afterwards.  Keep in mind that a scratch partition will still exist in RAM.  Alternativley to manually configuring on the disks, you could leave it in RAM and configure your dumps and logs to go to the dump collector and syslog server.