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x007alfa
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[HELP] - HPE DL380 G10 - SmartArray S100i SR

Hello community,

this is mostly a request to confirm my doubts... am I right in assuming that ESXi 6.7.0 HPE Edition does not support the HBA in the title?

That is the integrated Controller in my server and it needed to be cheap...

Smart Array S100i SR does only software raid from what I could understand... am I right?

Is there a way to make it work somehow?

I have connected 4x 4TB drives in Raid5...

Thanks for any help Smiley Happy

If this does not work what is a cheap raid card I can throw in this server to make it operational?

Thanks again! o/

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Robuea
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be careful throwing in a 'cheap' raid card. You're using RAID5 which will perform very badly without controller cache and battery.  This means that you ideally would need a P-series HP raid controller (+cache and battery).

If you want it as cheaply as possible, research and see what is on the HCL and works on a Gen10 380.  You may get lucky and find that an old (but very good) HP P822 controller would fit the bill - very cheap on auction sites.  It doesn't offer UEFI boot, so you wont be able to boot from it, but presumably you're booting from SD/USB. If you do need to boot, then the ROM should work in Legacy boot mode.

If it's production, buy the recommended P-Series raid card from the quickspecs doc.

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daphnissov
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No, ESXi does not support any fake RAID (aka "software RAID") controllers and there's no way to make them work. Regardless, they are pieces of junk and you should never trust your data to them. Spend the money, get at least a half-way decent hardware RAID controller and you'll be better off.

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Robuea
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be careful throwing in a 'cheap' raid card. You're using RAID5 which will perform very badly without controller cache and battery.  This means that you ideally would need a P-series HP raid controller (+cache and battery).

If you want it as cheaply as possible, research and see what is on the HCL and works on a Gen10 380.  You may get lucky and find that an old (but very good) HP P822 controller would fit the bill - very cheap on auction sites.  It doesn't offer UEFI boot, so you wont be able to boot from it, but presumably you're booting from SD/USB. If you do need to boot, then the ROM should work in Legacy boot mode.

If it's production, buy the recommended P-Series raid card from the quickspecs doc.

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x007alfa
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Hi y'all Smiley Happy

Thanks for the answers!

Yeah that's what I thought...

I managed to find on my local retailer a new P408i for about 200€ that hooks up to the motherboard special slot and uses the same cables for the back plane I have in the machine...

For such an expensive machine it really is a shame that it doesn't have even a basic hardware raid controller...

The hypervisor is ment for a laboratory so yeah loss of data would be kinda bad... but honestly the company that requested the supply wanted everything just in exchange for advertising to their customers... we are a small company so we have to be careful especially in this period...

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HendersonD
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We have 7 HPE DL380 Gen10 boxes. Seven of them are used for ESXi and one is used as a Veeam proxy server. The 7 ESXi boxes have an HP USB stick in them that has ESXi installed. This USB stick has two micro SD cards and is already setup for mirroring. That is the way to go. You can easily purchased from a variety of source

https://www.provantage.com/hpe-741279-b21~7HEWH1AR.htm

We do use the software raid for our Veeam survey to mirror the two SSD drives and that works fine

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x007alfa
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I ended up overnighting a p408 SR gen10 card and it seems to work pretty well...

is it normal that to build a raid5 array of 4 4tb disks it took the entire night and some hours of the morning?

it's working now anyway that would be just a minor question if somebody knows Smiley Happy

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Robuea
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yep, that's about right for building a 4 x 4TB Raid5 array.  You can modify the raid rebuild priority in the array configuration utility.  Faster rebuild priority obviously impacts overall performance.

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