ESXi 4.0 hardware prerequisites

[deathtospam]

I'm just getting started trying to kick the tires on a basic ESXi 4.0 installation. I was reading the first few pages of the setup guide, but the layout got me a bit confused as to what was required where hard drives and controllers are concerned.

Right now, I have a simple 1U rackmount server with an AMD Opteron 64-bit CPU, 4-GB of RAM and four SATA HDDs, all of which are managed via the onboard (and probably not HCL-compliant) chipset. Only one SATA HDD is currently in use as the Windows 2003 boot disk.

Is a SATA or SAS RAID controller or onboard chipset required in

order to install ESXi 4.0? And if so, what is it required for? Sorry if this is a common noobie question -- I did some searching via both Google and on the forums, but couldn't find any answers.

[Borja_Mari]

Hi,

you can check the official esxi 4.0 requirements here:

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40u1_i/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm#href=getting_started/r_esxi_req.h...

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

Also you can check this so good community driven hcl:

http://vm-help.com/esx40i/esx40_whitebox_HCL.php

Now, you have all the related information to be confident to running esxi 4.0

Un saludo/Regards,

Pablo

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[deathtospam]

As I mentioned in my original post, I already checked the official requirements page. It lists a whole bunch of SAS- and SATA-related bullet points, none of which tell me whether a RAID controller is required.

[K-MaC]

Hello, software raid will not work. A raid controller preferably with bbwc.

Cheers

Kevin

[Borja_Mari]

Hi,

if you check the links i commented, you can see that the officially supported SAS controllers (to get working SATA drives) are this ones:

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SATA disk drives – SATA disk drives connected behind supported SAS controllers or supported on-board SATA controllers.

Supported SAS controllers include:

LSI1068E (LSISAS3442E)

LSI1068 (SAS 5)

IBM ServeRAID 8K SAS controller

Smart Array P400/256 controller

Dell PERC 5.0.1 controller

Supported on-board SATA include:

Intel ICH9

Nvidia MCP55

ServerWorks HT1000

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Officially, the supported RAID controllers are this:

RAID controllers – Dell PERC (Adaptec RAID or LSI MegaRAID), HP Smart Array RAID, or IBM (Adaptec) ServeRAID controllers.

But you can also check the disk controllers that the community reported to work:

Un saludo/Regards,

Pablo

Please consider awarding any helpful answer. Thanks!! - Por favor considera premiar las respuestas útiles. Muchas gracias!!

[DSTAVERT]

If this is just a look see then you may be able to install on a non Hardware Raid controller. There are several that do work. I would consult the http://vm-help.com site to see whether your motherboard has any issues. If you need RAID support then use the Hardware Compatibility List to help making you choice. One of the LSI controllers on the list are a good choice since ESXi has agents that allow you to monitor the drives and controller.

[asatoran · Accepted solution]

Is a SATA or SAS RAID controller or onboard chipset required in order to install ESXi 4.0? And if so, what is it required for?

To try to answer your question more basically: no, a RAID controller is not required to install ESX. If this machine is a production machine, then you'll want a hardware RAID controller, preferrably one on the HCL, since you'll want the "R" part of RAID (Redundant Array of Independant Drives) for some reliability. But for a training machine, you can get away with a little downtime, so installing ESX to even a single hard drive is fine.

[deathtospam]

What you said makes perfect sense. But if we don't need to buy a dedicated RAID controller to use in a test server in a test-only environment, I'd rather not.

So, just to be clear: while having a RAID controller and installing ESX to an array (RAID-5/6/50/60) would be advisable -- for example, when deployed in a production environment -- it's not technically required?

[asatoran]

So, just to be clear: while having a RAID controller and installing ESX to an array (RAID-5/6/50/60) would be advisable -- for example, when deployed in a production environment -- it's not technically required?

Correct. You may install ESX(i) to a non RAID controller and use individual, independent hard drive(s). Me personally, my test environment consists of several whiteboxes and some name brand workstations, all without RAID. The type of testing being done, it was determined that not having RAID was an acceptable risk.

[Nikhil_Patwa]

Hi

RIAD controller is recommended for ESXi 4.0 installation but can do without RAID.

I have 4 ESXi 4.0 servers (Dell PowerEdge 2950 x3, 2970 x1) all with Hardware RAID 5. I get more than a Terabyte of hard disk space and with that all my production, test, coding environments are stored. What I have done is created separate networks for each set of environments i.e. Production VMs are on the physical network, test VMs are on Support network, coding VMs are on Coding network. Only the production network is attached to the physical LAN. This enables us to have all environments within the same physical host.

Regards

Nikhil

[storto]

Hi All,

I've 4 SATA Disk and I'm running ESX 4 on a compatible but not supported ASUS Mainboard.

Since I need a hardware RAID 10, could I use a SAS one supported by VMWare?

In other words, is it possible to build a SAS RAID with SATA Disks?

thank you.

[J1mbo]

Yes, Dell's Perc 5i or 6i or HP's E200 would be the usual controllers to choose for this. They will support 8 SATA drives and can be purchased through eBay for about a hundred bucks usually. Be sure to get the optional battery to enable write-back caching, and avoid Dell's cut-down (and rubbish) "iR" models.

HTH

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