ESXi at standalone server

[sluge]

hello

I have standalone server with ESXi installed, I want to put RHEL on it and I need to provide reliability for hard disks, using RAID 1 array. Is any way to provide this functionality on host under ESXi?

[WaffleSniffer]

Hi

If I understand right, this all depends on the server that you are running ESXi on.  If the server has a hardware RAID card, the protection of the hard drives for the host is handled by the RAID controller and has nothing to do with ESXi (though you would need some monitoring of the hardware so you know if there is a failure...).  If these drives are in a RAID1 array then naturally the .vmdk for the RHEL guest is protected as the datastore is located on the internal (RAID1) drives of the server its self.

Of course the server is still a single point of failure, so it's not something I would want to use in a production environment.

Hope this makes sense.

Cheers

Adam

[dhabbetichandra]

You didnt mention your staorage devices details.But here is my opinion:

1.(a) If you have a shared storage(SAN) you can take two different LUNS(for redundancy) and you can implement mirroring(Software raid1) on that.

  (b) you can use RDM also

2.If your ESXi has capability of Harware raid you can implemnt hardware raid 1 put rhel on that.

if you can share your storage details community can give better suggetions/solutions.

[sluge]

my server no external storage like SAN or NAS, only embedded hard disks.

How can I know, is my ESXi has RAID capabilities or not?

[WaffleSniffer]

Hi

What sort of server are you using?  Is it a specific manufacturer (e.g. Hp, Dell) or is it a whitebox?

To determine if you have a RAID controller installed, you should usually see some options when booting the server to configure the drives.  Are you getting this at all?

Cheers

Adam

[dhabbetichandra]

You can check in bios for raid options for your server. In worest case you can create two datastores (use two individual disks for that).  And create two vmdks each one from both datastores and implement software raid. that would be helpful.it will have redundancy.