RAID Support

[MRVMAN1]

I have a server with an Intel S5000PSL motherboard installed in it. The board has a built in RAID controller which handles RAID 5 with RAID Key Installed on it. I've installed the key (AXXRAKSW5) and set up a RAID 5 with five (5) 1TB SATA drives. However, when I install ESXi on the system it shows me all five drives as individuals rather than one (1) drive. When I try to install on just one of the drives (device 0) I receive an install error at 50% (I'm sure this is because the system is installing on only one of the RAID drives rather than the array.

Could someone please help me with this?

[weinstein5]

Have you confirmed that the RAID controller is supproted? Also ESXi and ESX can only access storage less than 2 TB

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[MRVMAN1]

Could you tell me where can I find a HCL for ESXi?

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility

Given that ESXi sees only the individual drives this is likely a software RAID controller and ESXi doesn't not support RAID for those types of controllers.

[MRVMAN1]

Thanks, this is what I was thinking. do you know if I can still use the other drives if I remove them from the RAID? This will mean I will have a total of 5 1TB drives.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Yes, but it would be better to change the mode of the controller to non-RAID. Note that with ESX(i) you have a 2 TB (2.0 TB - 512 B) LUN limit so you would not have been able to create a single RAID 5 array with all 5 drives and use all the space anyways. With some controllers you can create multiple arrays on the same disk and in that case you could create 2 RAID 5 arrays on the disk and ESXi would bet able to use all 4 TB of storage if both arrays were less than 2 TB in size.