OCZ RevoDrive 350 on ESXi 5.5

[rafskr]

Hi there,

I'm modifying my home lab and i was thinking about CZ RevoDrive 350. Does anybody know  if this card will be discovered and can be used as local storage on ESXi 5.5?

Card is quite expensive and i don't want to stuck with unused stuff.

I know that it's no supported and not listed on HCL, but still this is home lab and i just need fast storage.

Thanks in advance.

[fourg]

We have a couple hosts on ESXi 5.5 which have older OCZ RevoDrive 2's in them and they're working for local storage, however we just purchased a handful of OCZ RevoDrive 3's and found that they aren't showing up in ESXi 5.5.  After investigation we found that these cards use the SiI 3124 SATA controller (sata-sil24) and that according to a VMware KB article last updated June 11th 2014 this controller is deprecated/unsupported in ESXi 5.5. 

My understanding of this is that since we weren't yet on ESXi 5.5 when installing our first batch they were picked up by ESXi and usable, so if we rollback our other hosts temporarily to ESXi 5.1, confirm the card shows up, then upgrade them back to ESXi 5.5 we should be set.  Of course this isn't best practice, and VMware makes sure to remind us things can go wrong in the short or near term, so we'll have to keep an eye on it.

[rafskr]

So this CZ RevoDrive 350 uses 4x LSI Sand Force 2282 controllers. Looks like ESXi5.5 needs separate driver, but it should work.

Too bad i bought already 4x Corsair GT. I will connect them on LSI SAS2208 RAID. Hopefully they'll scale up very nice and home lab will speed up, otherwise have to send them back.

[Siclone]

Thanks for the info guys - I was looking at doing exactly the same thing (running a RevoDrive 350 on ESXi 5.5).

Perhaps OCZ will release their own driver for it, after all, they are still planning on supporting Linux, so who knows, maybe they will support ESX?

[fourg]

I ended up having zero success getting the Revodrive3 working in ESXi 5.1 or 5.5.  Reaching out to OCZ they just told me to buy their enterprise products that are on the VMware HCL.  I tried the VMware driver they have for the Z-Drive, but it didn't help.