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?
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.
Have you confirmed that the RAID controller is supproted? Also ESXi and ESX can only access storage less than 2 TB
If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful
Could you tell me where can I find a HCL for ESXi?
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.
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.
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.