Serial ATA RAID Controller for ESX 3i

[Scottish_Captai]

Greetings to all.

So I'm putting together a dedicated 3i machine. I have exactly one PCI-X slot, and several PCI-e 8x slots.

The machine will boot from an onboard USB socket (on the motherboard) using a standard ~16GB USB key.

I have 6 250GB SATA drives that I would like to run as a pair of RAID5 500GB arrays (each).

I know the LSI Megaraid 300-8X PCI-X card is semi-supported in ESXi (it works with a few minutes of hackery), and that's what I'll use if I can't find anything else. Is anyone aware of any other 6+ port SATA RAID card that is otherwise supported in ESXi, and comes in either PCI-X or PCI-e 8x flavors?

Cheerio.

-SC

[Dave_Mishchenko]

The MegaRAID SAS 8708ELP is supported and has write cache (you'd want to add the battery module as well). Are you looking for "officially supported" or just works? The 300-8x would not be considered supported. I've also used an adaptec 4800SAS (not supported but it works fine).

[Scottish_Captai]

I'm booting the server off USB. If I've got to edit some random file somewhere to "make it work" (as long as it works, and is stable), then I don't mind doing that to get local storage up and running.

My only requirements were:

- 6x Drive Support (preferably with 6 actual SATA connectors- not those compact IPass connectors or whatever they're called)

- Battery Backup Unit

- Preferably a removable cache slot for expandable RAM

- PCI-e or PCI-X

Anything that meets those and can be /made to work/ in ESXi, I can roll with.

-SC

[dmarrow]

I've had very good success with an Adaptec 3405 & 3408 that I bought fom ebay. The 3408 is an 8pt card.

[thomaslam]

Hello, I too have the issue installing the VMware 3i 3.5.0. Hardwares: CPU - Quad Core 2.4Ghz. using Intel MB Memory - 8GB Raid Card - Adaptec 3405 controller (per the HCL on VMware - this is suppose to be a supported device) Hard Drive - 4x500GB SATA drives

This is a whitebox system with supported hardware. I am tempted to try the ESX Enterprise version just to see now.

I am getting this error:

"The installation operation has encountered a fatal error - unable to find a supported device to write the VMware ESX 3i 3.5.0 image to"

Any ideas why this is happen?

Thanks, Thomas

[rpcblast]

I had a similar problem, and it turned out to be the NIC. This was on an hp dc7800p with an intec Q35 chipset. Once i dropped in an intel pro/1000 nic it fired right up.

[thomaslam]

I have a intel nic 10/100 pro card...

The funny thing is that I am able to get it to work without the Adaptec 3405 card using just the onboard SATA controller. I think this is why I am getting the error b/c the installer is looking for that instead of the Adaptec 3405.

Checking the BIOS - but no option to turn off the the onboard SATA controller. I already disabled the onboard NIC controller via the BIOS.

I also tried downloading the Installer with Update1 and it still not working for me.