I'm putting together a desktop VM server plan, and one of the things I keep bumping up against is:
* I want it to fit into a relatively small form factor -- I would *love* for it to fit into a mini-ITX cube case.
* Integrated RAID generally is not very flexible for non-Windows uses -- you're lucky if you get 0/1/10, forget anything as exotic as RAID 6.
* Add-on RAID controllers: reliable, featureful, cheap -- pick any two.
So, I was wondering if I can do this:
* Install ESXi on a flash drive. Create an OpenFiler VM in the flash drive and give it the individual hard drives as raw devices. Have OpenFiler software-RAID them to do RAID 5 or 6, and then export that volume over iSCSI *back* to the host to create a VMFS on.
Is this feasible? If so, will it actually perform? Am I a hopelessly optimistic fool or an evil genius? 
WendellGee wrote:
I'm putting together a desktop VM server plan, and one of the things I keep bumping up against is:
* I want it to fit into a relatively small form factor -- I would *love* for it to fit into a mini-ITX cube case.
* Integrated RAID generally is not very flexible for non-Windows uses -- you're lucky if you get 0/1/10, forget anything as exotic as RAID 6.
* Add-on RAID controllers: reliable, featureful, cheap -- pick any two.
So, I was wondering if I can do this:
* Install ESXi on a flash drive. Create an OpenFiler VM in the flash drive and give it the individual hard drives as raw devices. Have OpenFiler software-RAID them to do RAID 5 or 6, and then export that volume over iSCSI *back* to the host to create a VMFS on.
Is this feasible? If so, will it actually perform? Am I a hopelessly optimistic fool or an evil genius?
Integrated RAID on Windows is still software, so it sucks no matter what OS. 
It's just assisted by propritary drivers.
That is a pretty solid idea as long as you pick hardware that ESXi5 is happy with (tricky for the form factor), it's basically a cheap setup of VMWare's VSA or HP's VSA, and they work well for home systems. RAID-5 is typically going to blow for virtualization, but if it's just a small home project with a small number of low-loaded VMs you'll probably be happy with it.
I'd possibly look at FreeNAS because I've heard of issues with OpenFiler, then again you should be able to swap out the underlying OSes fairly easily anyway.
As far as I know you can grab ESXi supported RAID cards for ~$100, kind of pricy for a home setup (kinda), but it isn't too bad.