Hello All
I am fairly new to ESXI so I apologies in advanced if this has already been covered or is a stupid question.
I have recently got myself a HP Microserver running ESXI 5.1 (via a USB pen drive) it currently only has one HDD (250GB Sata installed) I have a few VMs running and everything is great.
I wanted to use the additional 4 bays available on the hp microserver and set up a NAS box with some redundancy so software raid 5.
So I starting thinking how I could link it all together, my first thoughts were to add the 4 disks to the datastore then set up a VM such as FreeNas or Openfiler adding the disks to VM then setting up the software raid within this environment. But I believe doing it this way i would have slow read / write speeds and also no visibility of the S.M.A.R.T status of the disks?
So i then started to look into setting up the RAID directly on ESXI via mdadm thinking i could then set up a vm system (such as nagios) to report on the SMART status however as ESXI is not derived from a Linux kernel this is not an option.
Am I overlooking something here? And is there an easy option so configer software RAID within this environment?
Thank you all in advanced
