HPE Proliant DL360 gen10 and onboard S100i controller for SATA local datastore

[APSteve]

We have ordered an HPE DL360 Gen10 server to use as a ESXi host.  It has an P21868-B21 HPE 32GB microSD RAID 1 USB Boot Drive added as the boot/OS for ESXi.

Our datastore is located on an NFS NAS and it has been suggested we should have a 500GB SSD added to the server as a local datastore for the swap file to improve performance.  (single drive, no RAID)

I have read some blogs that indicate adjusting the RAID and AHCI settings in BIOS will allow this config, but they were sketchy on the details.

Will VMWare recognize a SATA drive connected to the onboard S100i controller?  Thanks.

[danODOT]

Hello,

I also have HPE Proliant DL360 Gen10 servers that I'm intending on installing ESXi 7.0 on.  I ran into an issue with the S100i controller in that the ESXi installer couldn't see the mirrored drives I had created.  It turns out that I couldn't find the S100i controller on VMware's Compatibility Matrix, and from what I understand ESXi doesn't work with any software-based controllers.

Also if you look at HPE's specifications it only lists Windows as a compatible OS.  It does mention that you can use the embedded SATA ports in AHCI mode for Linux or ESXi but that doesn't support RAID.

We are going ahead with purchasing some E208i-a cards which are on the Compatibility Matrix, so we'll see how that goes.

I hope this helps, you can find HPEs specs for the S100i here.

[APSteve]

Thanks.