ESXI 5.5 - raid 1(mirror) - support raid card on budget

[bcsanthosh]

Hi guys,

I am trying to build a farm at home for learning purposes have got 2 1TB drives, I have installed the EXSI 5.5 on to usb and it is booting from the usb fine. However the software raid is not recognized and many on the form pointed out its not supported by EXSI. Options are to use vhghetto haven't used it before not sure how complex it is or do a hardware raid, Can you please recommend a supported raid controller on budget that will work with EXSI? as mentioned before I just have two drives need to mirror it nothing fancy plan to have may be 3 vm's system h/w configuration is below:

ASUS z87k motherboard, i7 4770k , 16GB ram

Thanks,

[JPM300]

Your best bet would either be a LSI megaraid card which runs from 400$ or so or get a used HP smart array 400 or some other old raid card out of an old server.

Another good option is dump 16gb or memory into your system, get a ssd drive and use autolab and VMware workstation to virtulize a 3node cluster.  I do this for my lab and it works well

Hope this has helped

[bcsanthosh]

Thanks for the reply, will any old Raid card be OK with ESXI? I doubt; amazon lists one for below £60 Hewlett Packard - HP Smart Array P400 256MB Controller - Storage controller (RAID) - SATA-150 SAS lo... will this work with EXSI?

Regards,

[JPM300]

Should be good, as it is listed on the HCL, just make sure you get a card that your system can take, aka PCI, and is on Vmwares HCL.  the P400 is listed twice, I think this is becuase of the different Firmware verisons on the card as they list a storage KB on it when you click on it that refers to what firmware you need for each driver level.  This is the only thing I can think of as everything is the same on both links SSID wise. 

Anything off the HCL will work for ya.

Also just make sure if you get it off Amazon or ebay to make sure there is some kind of return policy just in case it doesn't work out or has issues as I would hate for you to get burned on the 70$

Like I said before your other options are getting something like a LSI Mega Raid but they run a pretty high price, or just building a normal system and then running ESXi virtually on top of that with VMware workstation to do lab work.

Hope this has helped.