hello everybody,
i'm pretty new to VMWare virtualization platform and i have a question for you.
i have a server i have to run ESXi on, wich has a damnly crap fakeRAID controller.
so when i try to install VMWare ESXi the raid array is not recognized and disks are shown separately.
i was wondering if there was a way to let vmware itself handle the task with something similar to linux LVM.
i've a similar setup on an equal machine using xen, and it works pretty fine.
else it becomes pretty hard to manage virtual disks for the VMs if i have to fit them in single HDs instead of dealing with a single storage.
sorry for my bad english.
Welcome to the forum. ESXi isn't capable of using LVM nor fakeRAID controllers. Sorry for bad news.
Damn
that's really a BAD news
There are some failry decenet real RAID controlers out there for a decent price - check out the VMware HCL and look at some of the chipsets, then do some searches for products that use those chipsets. It may take a little time, but you should be able to find one for a couple hundred bucks.
Also, as far as LVM, ESX(i) has its own volume management system, so even though it doesn't support LVM specifically, it does its own volume management.
well, since it's not for production purposes but just for testing, i don't have any budget to invest for a raid controller.
you said ESX(i) has it's own volume management.
is it possible to aggregate multiple hard drive in a way so that i can use it as a single big storage? no metter it's not called LVM, since that's wat LVM actually does.
You can use extents to join up to 32 - 2 TB LUNs into a single volume. It's not necessarily recommended to use as loss of a single extent will have consequences on the entire volume.
...but, it is exactly what LVM does...
it works pretty fine with extents
thnx a lot for the help
The cheapest SATA RAID controller I found costs about 160,-- EUR. I'm still not convinced buying it for my home server, so actually I'm using two SATA disks having software RAID within the more important VMs.