Adaptec Serial ATA RAID 1210SA any luck with this working on ESX?

[skilachi2]

Hello,

Has anyone confirmed if Adaptec Serial ATA RAID 1210SA works on ESX yet? This is just for testing purpose and not production. I've been searching through the internet for low-cost Serial ATA RAID that has been confirmed works on ESX (LSI Logic MegaRAID 150-4, LSI Logic MegaRAID 150-6, Adaptec 2610SA and possibly Adaptec 2410SA) .

After searching for the prices, which ranges well over £130 -£300 for the new LSI MagaRAID 300-8X SATA II RAID. So was wondering if anyone has been able to use Adaptec 1210SA successfully on ESX, which is just under £50 as i'm about to get one and try on my ESX 3....[http://www.microwarehouse.co.uk/action/search?root=604167&query=604167%2F%2F%2F&attr=brand&value=ADAPTEC]

Also heard the new version of ESX 3 (3.5 or so) supports SATA drive installation of ESX including the VMFS, VMCORE files.....can anyone confirm cos buying the expensive Controller might be a waste of money if in the long run the new version now fully supports full SATA 150 or SATA II drives installation

Thanks

[oreeh]

The 1210SA doesn't work.

The 2410SA/2610SA works.

[dominic7]

I'm almost positive that the 1210SA will not work as it implements software RAID ( in hardware ). You can identify controllers that use software raid because they don't use an onbaord cache, of which this card has none. I wouldn't waste any money on it.

You can pick up an adaptec 2610sa on ebay for around $100USD. In the past I had also been picking up HP P400 w/ 512MiB cache and battery for around $200USD, but that seems to be hit and miss lately. Perhaps the supply of them dried up. Cards based on the LSI 1068 chipset also seem to work well and have pretty good performance.

There are other options as well, such as using NFS and/or iSCSI for a datastore which don't involve buying RAID cards at all.

No one here will be able to answer questions about 3.5, it's under NDA.

[skilachi2]

Thanks guys, well guess i'll have to get it in the end (Adaptec or LSI MegaRAID). The thing is cant get cheaper NAS box which supports NFS, most of then are SMB/CIFS/NTFS and iSCI, which i believe will involve running Linux, correct me if i'm wrong.....and me coming from a WINTEL background with no knowledge of Linux/Unix environment and Virtualisation been the next boom in the IT industry and have to involved with ESX and not sure wot MS are doing with their MS 2008 virtualisation server, which looks ok (based on Vista though and not a fan of it).

Will check out the NDA forum for the 3.5 version.

[doubleH]

i'm experimenting with a windows iSCSI target at home. it's from rockdivision. i was able to get my 2 esx hosts to see the shared storage. i haven't tried a vmotion yet as i'm waiting for my additional RAM to show up

i'm a windows guy as well, but was able to get openfiler running in my poc lab before implementing vmware.

[skilachi2]

Hi Double H.....thanks. Guess i'll have on that as soon as i get home cos i'm done here 4 2day. My email is maybe you can go through how you were able to configure this.

[mouloudb]

Please don't send email

[oreeh]

I'm not sending emails.

If you receive emails regarding this (or another) thread you probably have email notifications turned on.

You can disable them in your profile settings.

[doubleH]

i think because you are a mod he wanted you to remove the email addy that was posted earlier in the thread.

[oreeh]

Hmm, the only email address I can see is the one from skilachi2 and since he himself posted it I won't remove it unless he asks me to do so.