ESX using Dell PERC 5/i RAID with SATA drives. Yes or No?

[mbriceno]

Dear Gurus,

Will the latest version of ESX work with a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server, PERC 5/i RAID card, with SATA drives behind the RAID? I am looking for a definite answer since I need to order the hardware tomorrow.

Searching Google and these forums was inconclusive. According to Dell, the PERC 5/i will work with ESX if SAS drives are used. Conversely, Dell's website will not let you order ESX as the OS when the PERC 5/i is used with SATA drives. But then, it seems unlikely that the OS, in this case ESX, would care whether the drives behind the RAID controller are SAS or SATA.

Can somebody here please give me a positive answer, ideally from personal experience?

Thanks in advance,

-- Clueless User

[balacs]

Here is my understanding: The SATA drives should work. But it is official not supported by Dell (and VMware). That is why you have a restriction when ordering in dell.com. The offical support maybe available in the future releases, but for now only SAS is supported.

Let me know if this answers your question.

Bala, Dell Inc.

[dominic7 · Accepted solution]

You can use SATA driver with the PERC 5/i ( also interesting to note that the PERC 5/i and PERC 5/i integrated are not the same card ). You will need to make sure they are in a RAID set though, you can't just pass the devices through and expect it to work with ESX.

[mbriceno]

Thank you very much for your helpful response. ESX turned out to work fine using SATA drives behind a PERC 5/i RAID controler in both RAID-1 and RAID-5 mode. The one thing to keep in mind that had not realized was that the volume that contains the vmfs Datastore cannot be larger than 2TB or ESX will seem to operate fine, but fail to show the Datastore. Splitting the RAID into two smaller volumes fixed this. Thank again for your help!