MSI Z77A-G43 Raid problem

[SZLaszlo]

Hello,

I bought one server with MSI Z77A-G43 motherboard. Have raid option in bios. I enabled and work fine example with win svr 2008 r2. But if i want install ESXi 5.1 U1 or the last 5.0 the installer didn't see the raid. I have 2 disk and i try with raid 1. Anyone can help me to repair this problem?

(Sorry for my bad english.)

[JarryG]

Unfortunatelly, ESXi does *not* support soft-/bios-/fake-raid (which is exactly what you have on your motherboard). Only real hardware raid-controllers (and not all of them). I recommend you to check "Hardware compabitility list"...

[SZLaszlo]

I already bought a phisical raid card.

Name: LSI SAS3041E SAS S-ATA 3GBit RAID Controller PCI-e

Prop.: LSI Logic 3041E-R PCI-e 3Gb/s, SAS/SATA 4-port Host Bus Adapter RAID 0, 1, 1E,10E Processzor LSISAS1064E Internal JBOD enclosures Mixed SAS/SATA RAID n 140,000 I/Os

I have 2 1 tb SATA disk.

If i use this raid card the vmware on the install see the raid array but with this card the esxi 5.1 / 5.0 very slow! Example one operation without this raid card 4 min with this raid card 40 min. I think its not normal.

[JarryG]

You are right that's not normal, but on the other hand, I'm affraid this model is not officially supported. You can check yourself:

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

As a rule of thumb, try to avoid raid-0/1/10 controllers. Those are basically very low-end models, with no cache, no batery-backup unit, very weak (or none) cpu, no hw xor-unit, etc. Performance of such controllers (especially if you want to run multiple VMs) is very low...