Can I use SATA RAID (RAID-5) on ESXi?

[Derekius]

I have a desktop I rebuilt as a Hyper-V server a while ago, and I just did some upgrades to it and want to rebuild it with ESXi.  The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5, which has the NVIDIA^® nForce 590-SLI chipset for SATA RAID.  I configured 3 1TB drives in a RAID-5 array, but when I boot from the ESXi 4.1 U1 installer disc, it shows me the 3 individual drives instead of my logical drive.  When I boot with the Hyper-V 2008 R2 Server installer disc, it sees my logical drive, so I know the RAID setup is right.  I noticed the VMWare HCL says "IDE RAID and SATA RAID are not supported for the VMFS file system", but is this any SATA RAID or just certain ones?  I read on a third-party site that some of these onboard RAID controllers actually use software RAID, so I was wondering if I were to purchase a standalone RAID controller if I would still have the same problem.  I am looking at either the Rosewill RC-217 or the HighPoint RocketRAID 2300, but I want to get someone to confirm that the RAID controller I order will actually let me use RAID-5 for my ESXi setup.

Anyone have experience with ESXi on SATA RAID?

[DSTAVERT]

ESXi does not supprt software RAID. The links to the RAID cards are also software RAID. You will need to find one on the HCL http://vmware.com/go/hcl You may also have trouble with the onboard network adapter.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Welcome to the VMware Communities forums.   The drivers that come with ESXi don't support software RAID functionality.  Best to go with something that  is on the HCL and battery backed write cache is important to performance.

[Derekius]

Wow, you guys are quick!  I have a DL380 G6 that is on the HCL for production use but I wanted to take this other box for testing.  I know I could use my DL380 and keep production/test VMs separate, but I really want to keep the hardware separate, and performance is not so much an issue as just getting it to work.  I had not even thought about the NICs not working 😕

I'm really just looking for the cheapest solution to use my existing 3 1TB drives in RAID-5 and get ESXi working.  Any ideas which SATA RAID controller is the cheapest on the HCL?

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You can pick up a Dell Perc 5 / 6 card and those work fine.

[a_p_]

Whatever hardware RAID controller you choose, consider to get one with battery buffered cache (BBU) to be able to configure write-back mode for disk performance! This makes a huge difference.

André

[Derekius]

The NICs are Marvell 88E1116 (gigabit), and when I disable the onboard RAID and install on a single drive, it installs, pulls an address from DHCP, and I can connect with my vSphere Client.  I'm still working on getting a basic VM setup to test whether the VMs can use the NICs, but as I said before, whether it is supported or not is not a concern to me, so long as it works.  This is a test box only and will not be needed for production.  I still need to find a RAID controller that will work with my SATA drives though...

[Dave_Mishchenko]

If you're OK for now without RAID just turn off RAID mode on the controller and it'll work fine.  Performance is not great but if it's just test then it might be sufficient.

[Derekius]

I disabled RAID, set the SATA mode to AHCI, installed on 1 of the 3 drives, and deployed a virtual appliance from the VA marketplace.  I can ping the ESXi host and my virtual appliance, so the NICs seem to work and my controller is find if I don't use RAID.  Even though this is just a test box, I will be running some short-to-long term test VMs and I would really like to stick with RAID-5.  I'm currently trying to find a SATA RAID card on the HCG that is in my price range, but it's not looking good 😕

[J1mbo]

As said above Dell's Perc 5i or better 6i controllers will probably be what you need.  The 6i can be had on eBay for about US $150.  Actually it is available directly from Dell for not much more at the moment.

Some info: http://blog.peacon.co.uk/wiki/Dell_Perc_6i

A mirror (RAID-1) would give much better write performance and RAID-10, for the cost of one more disk, would be much better overall than RAID-5.

[rsandoz]

I saw an idea where someone setup a VM with FreeNAS (esxi and freenas VM on boot SSD) and used FreeNAS to recognize two harddrives as software raid1 array.  Then used iSCSI for VMWare to see it.  At first, it sounds kind of scary, on the other hand, I wouldn't have to worry about commiting to the proprietariness of my motherboard's hardware raid.

Actually I would be happier with just a weekly job to dupe the entire VM filesystem from one HD to the other.