Installing ESXi 4.1 on RAID1

[awt1231]

I maybe making this harder than needed. Can ESXi be installed on a RAID1?

I have tried, configured my RAID1, created the partition, but when I go to install ESXi, I am shown both hard drives and not the RAID1.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Allen

[Rumple · Accepted solution]

you are using an unsupported software raid controller, therefore esx is not recongnising the sector remapping and is able to identify the individual drives.

I would suggest trying ESXi on a USB drive and from there you can see if the RAID1 array will show up as a single volume you cna use for vmfs.

Remember 2 things though...size of RAID 1 cannot be larger then 2TB-512 bytes or esx will not see size correctly (probably not an issue unless you used 3TB drives)

Performance is gonig to be pretty bad as there is no battery backup on the controller itself so write speeds will suck under load.

[awt1231]

Thanks for the quick and informative answer.

As for the RAID1, I was just going to use two 250gb hard drives just for the safety of the ESXi system. But if there is going to be that bad of proformance, then I will drop back and punt.

I will try your suggestion on putting the ESXi on the USB drive and have the Datastore on the RAID1.

Thanks again for your advice.

Allen

[Jackobli]

If it's a fake raid, how could putting ESXi on an USB stick help?

Perhaps it would be better to spend some cash for a real raid controller (with BBWC)?