RAID is not detected during ESXi 5.1 installation

[Bl4ckW1nd0w]

It is required to install ESXi 5.1 on an HP DL320 G6. The server has 4 disks of 250 GB and the possibilities of RAID are: RAID 1 + 0 or RAID 0. The option RAID 1 + 0 is chosen.

During the installation of ESXi 5.1, when the option of which disk to install is shown, the 4 disks appear instead of 1 logical volume corresponding to the RAID

Can anyone help? Thanks in advance and greetings,

[Finikiez]

Do you have a dedicated RAID controller in your host?

Also I suppose your disks are connected to internal software raid on a system board. This configuration is not supported by ESXi host.

[Bl4ckW1nd0w]

Thank you very much for the prompt response

And is there any way to install ESXi with some fault tolerance settings on this server? Although it is limiting the space or disks

[Finikiez]

You can install ESXi on USB stick or SD card. It's not necessary to have redundant boot device for ESXi.

However if you want to store virtual machines on local disks and you want to have redundant configuration you have to buy RAID controller compatible with you host and ESXi

Look into HCL VMware Compatibility Guide - I/O Device Search

[saikumarv]

Hi,

Either hardware RAID should be there on system;

or

sofware RAID should be there to support fault tolerant or redundancy;

If you have multiple ESXi, then VSAN can help, with SAS disk on each ESXi for cache and internal

disks can be configured part of VSAN and provide a logical volume.

this is the supported architecture.

Hope this information helps.

[Bl4ckW1nd0w]

The discs are internal and they are 4 discs. The only option that the server allows is a RAID 1 + 0 or 0.

Installing ESXi on a USB or SD card I understand what it means to waste the hardware.

Thanks in advance to everyone for the answers!

[bluefirestorm · Accepted solution]

The DL320 G6 is quite old hardware.

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c01757928

The CPU is either Nehalem (E55xx or L55xx) or Westmere (E56xx or X56xx) generation. It will be better if it is Westmere as it has additional features such as AES instructions (makes encryption/decryption faster) that Nehalem does not have.

The built-in controller B110i is NOT in the compatibility guide.

https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=io

Installing ESXi hypervisor on USB or SD card is not exactly a waste of hardware. Once the hypervisor boots up, there is not much interaction between the USB/SD card boot media as hypervisor activity is almost exclusively running in memory. You can still use the disks as datastore except that you won't have the RAID capability unless you install a qualified/supported RAID controller.

Considering that it is quite an old server, it might be better to stick without a RAID controller especially if this setup is for learning purpose; as getting a newer generation RAID controller will likely bring its own sets of issues/headaches while it might be very hard to find one that is from the G6 generation.