Installing ESXi 3.5 U4 onto RAID1

[Yumashka]

I'm trying to install ESXi 3.5 U4 on this server:

MB: SE7501HG2
Storage: onboard Adaptec AIC-7902 Ultra320 SCSI
CPU: 2 x Xeon 3 GHz
HDD: 2 x 73 Gb configured as RAID1 (HostRAID)

But ESXi installer sees disks not as RAID1 but as two separate disks and asks me to select disk to install to.

Is it possible to install ESXi on RAID1 volume in this case?

Is it possible to monitor RAID health somehow?

[DSTAVERT]

The Adaptec card is not a hardware raid device and so it will only see the individual drives. There are no Adaptec monitoring modules so monitoring is out. Have a look at the HCL

[Yumashka]

Yes, I've looked at HCL and I have seen AIC-7902 in it. But no explicit note that HostRAID are not supported. Only implicit "these devices are accessed directly through device drivers in the ESX host, and not through a host operating system".

Ok. But the following question: if there a way to provide redundancy, while there is almost impossible to buy true-hardware-RAID card here.

[DSTAVERT]

ESX is not ESXi. You can't install device drivers.

[DSTAVERT]

From the Adaptec website.

HostRAID is an integrated RAID technology that adds entry level RAID support. It is also called intelligent RAID on chip (iROC) or software RAID and it is built into the firmware of the controller. There is no additional RAID processor on HostRAID cards.

The software RAID is the problem as ESXi does not have the ability to support software RAID.

Can you have redundancy with this card? The answer would be no. You could use a script to copy the VMDK files between drives. Have a look at ghettoVCB

You could look into Dell Perc 4 cards. They are rebranded LSI cards and can be had pretty inexpensively on ebay or the like. They don't work in everything so you would need to do your homework.