Cannot find source for boot supported RAID cards

[CooperTech]

I actually have 2 related questions:

1. Is it advisable or necessary to install ESXi on a RAID protected volume? I would like to install it on a RAID1 just to have some redundancy but I cannot find a reliable source for information on what VMware supported RAID cards are actually bootable, most I have found can only be used for secondary storage (LSI/3ware).

2. What is the general recovery procedure if you had ESXi installed on a single drive and that drive has failed. Can you just reinstall on a new drive and it will see your VM datastore? I'm just looking for an overview so that I can determine the importantance of the ESXi install drive. If the recovery procedure is not that big of a deal then it would seem that a failure of the install drive would not be too bad assuming you could handle some down time.

Thanks!

[weinstein5]

Welcoem to the Forums -

1) Yes best practice is to install on mirrored drives -

2) If the VMs are stored on shared storage - SAN or NAS/NFS you will be able to readd them to the host you reinstalle dthe ESX server -

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[CooperTech]

That definitely helps, any idea on a list of supported RAID cards that are bootable?

[weinstein5]

Here is the official Hardware Compatability List (HCL) - http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

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[jkumhar75]

Wht is the make & model of your server on which you are going to install the ESX servers?

HP & IBM are already having the server ranges which are certified and having HCL for all the component for the Vmware ESX installation.

Jay

MCSE,VCP 310,VCP 410

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[CooperTech]

It's a supermicro motherboard (X8DAH+) which is certified for ESXi 4.0 U1 but what I really need is a list or at least recommendation on some SAS PCIe cards that can be booted from. The HCL is nice but you have to know exactly what you are looking for and then dig through all the notes to figure out if a card is supported for boot purposes. The lack of easy access to this information seems like a big hole in the HCL.