ESXi installation drive and IBM RAID card

[7007VM7007]

I am setting up my first ESXi 5.5 host and have a couple random questions that I hope someone can assist with:

1. I have two SSD drives that will be mirrored and used as a datastore for my VMs. From what I have read there are two options when installing ESXi: To a USB flash drive or to local storage. I was thinking of installing ESXi to the mirrored SSD drives as it will provide good performance and redundancy. Although my motherboard has a USB port on it, I am not keen on using a USB flash drive for booting ESXi as these drives do tend to fail. So is it ok to just install ESXi on the local storage?
2. I have an IBM MegaRAID M5015 RAID card (a rebadged LSI 9260-8i) which has two Samsung Pro 840 drives connected to it and it is working great. Has anyone tried the Samsung Pro 850 SSD drives connected to this particular RAID card? The 850 drives are not on the compatability list but I was curious to hear if anyone had successfully used them.

Thank you!

[e_espinel]

Hello.
The IBM HX5 blade server is very, very old. according to the documentation it only supports up to vmware 5.5.
You could try with version 6. But these versions are also very old.

Another tip would be to update all the firmware of the blade server hardware.

https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/tips0824#supported-operating-systems