I'm a home user and just built my first ESXi server (specs below) for both sand boxing and practical use. One of the practical uses is FreeNAS which I'd like to use as a home network wide share and redundant storage. I was hoping to use my
motherboards on-board RAID option and per-configured it to have RAID 1 setup for primary SSD drives only to see two separate drives when open going to setup up my first VM. After digging through online forums I learned to access the CLI via
SSH and found the following for my RAID controller which confuses me. It seems that ESXi see's the RAID controller, but still chooses to represent the disk independently. So onto my first question:
1. Is there a way to make ESXi acknowledge soft RAID and treat disks as the single volume I intended? Likely won't stick with this, but would like to have something until budget accommodates buying a real RAID controller.
2. Is there a way to create a VM with multiple disks with each associated to a specific physical device so I can create a software RAID via the VM? I'm using the ESXi vSphere Client and hence all limitations that apply to it.
3. I've already had a lot of hardware compatibility issues with items I selected based VMWares compatibility list for ESXi 5.5 which has resulted in me having to return 2 motherboards so far and only reason I got the one listed below is
advice from a buddy who had practical experience. If I get a Hard RAID controller what would be a good one that is guaranteed to work and provide good performance for the price considering I'm a home user.
4. Any suggestions or advice for a newb?
Hardware
Intel Xeon E3-1230
SuperMicro X10SLH-F-O
32 GBs DDR3-1600 ECC Unbuffered (4 Dimms)
2x SATA 3.0 240 GB SSD HyperX
Thank you.
Ad.1: No. ESXi does not support software- (bios-/ fake-) raid you can find on most cheap motherboards. But you can simply use those two single disks for VM and create sw-raid there
Ad.2: Of course. Either pass-through the whole disks to VM, or create two vdisks on two different storages (each storage on different disk), or map two raw disk areas on both disks to VM. Basically, you could create sw-raid even if both vDisks are on the same storage, but it would not make much sense...
Ad.3: Even HW which is not on supported list can work, but sometimes not all features are available (I had one raid-controller, some adaptec-type: it worked, but there was no way to monitor its health). So I recommend you to stick with HCL and look for some controller there. Just remember to pick one with on-board cache (ESXi does not do disk-caching) and battery-backup unit (or super-capacitor) if you want to use it as local ESXi-storage.
Ad.4: If you want to play with raid in VM, you can buy cheap hw-raid (even without cache, i.e. M1015 or LSI9211) and pass-through it to VM.
Thank you for the information. I looked at adding multiple virtual disks to a VM, but it seems it isn't providing the option for assigning the VD to a physical disk. I'm also not sure of the implications of passing the disks through to a VM since both currently have datastores on them. Thanks for the advice on hardware which I looked and which led to the LSI 9260-4i that can accommodate battery and has 512 MBs of RAM. It's still more expensive than I'd like, but I do want a redundant storage capabilities in case a drive fails so likely budget for it sometime next month.
If you are looking for serious hw-raid (as LSI-9260), I recommend to check re-branded models too. They are frequently cheaper (and sometimes better). For example IBM M5015 = LSI9260, but costs less and comes in standard package with battery (in case of LSI9260 you have to buy it extra).
I'm personally using IBM M5016 (aka LSI-9266). It has bigger and faster cache (1GB/ddr3 vs 512MB/ddr2), capacitor instead of battery (comes in package), supports raid6 and has dual-core cpu. Bought a few on eBay, brand new in original sealed package, for 250€ (compare it with LSI 9266-8i: ~400€, plus ~100 for battery). I'm flashing always original LSI-bios and use LSI-software (IBM is a few months behind). Never had any problem, and I'm very satisfied with performance...
I ended up picking up an LSI 9260-4i w/ battery for less than $150 so wasn't as bad as I was thinking. Unfortunately it did not work correctly with the motherboard I had which mislead me into thinking the BIOS on the motherboard needed updating. Unfortunately it didn't fix the problem and unknown to me at the time broke the boards ability to recognize all the cores in the CPU. I then flashed the RAID card which fixed everything with the RAID, but had to order a new motherboard. Anyhow thanks for the support.
