ESXi software raid

[gurubert]

Hi,

we have two PowerEdge 1850 without any hardware RAID support but with two 300GB internal SCSI disks each.

Currently thay are running Linux software raid (aka mdadm) and VMware Server.

Is it possible to install ESXi and create a software RAID1 for the ESXi datastore?

The ESXi install dialog only shows both disks separate to chose on which to install the hypervisor.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

ESXi does not support any software RAID functions. Nor are host-RAID controllers (Intel ICH*R / nVidia MCP **) supported for RAID either. With those controllers you can just use individual drives.

[james_black1]

Hey there Dave, you specify that it is not supported. Is it however possible? ESX is afterall linux right? linux does software raid. I'm sure this question will come up more and more as people cotton on to the fact that using ESX with its small footprint is better than say centos as the base... what do you think?

[kooltechies]

Hi,

ESXi doesn't have the conventional Linux kernel to support Software Raid. Its totally stripped for Virtualization and developed entirely by VMware

Thanks,

Samir

P.S : If you think that the answer is helpful please consider rewarding points.

[nick_couchman]

No, it is not possible at this time, nor is it likely to be in the future. Adding software RAID support to ESXi would take a good deal of work - there's a lot of kernel support that would need to be added, plus quite a few user-space utilities. Besides that, the Linux emulation layer in ESXi loads after VMkernel, which raises questions as to whether you could actually get ESXi booted correctly with a software RAID.

[joshin]

You could 'cheat' to make it work.

On the ESXi box create a FreeNAS or OpenFiler virtual machine. Assign it a 290GB chunk of each disk and make a RAID 1 'disk' out of the chunks. Then you can create virtual machines that use the disk space via local loop NFS or iSCSI. Just set the FreeNAS/OpenFiler virtual machine to start first. Yes, it is a bit hackish but it works fine.

-J

PS. Yadda yadda about giving me points if it all works.

[marvinicius]

sorry, wrong discussion