I don't know where to put this... its not exactly related to unraid (yet) but I need some help with ESXi, I can't get their forums to work, and I trust the user base here because I know some folks use ESXi.  So apologies in advance if this is totally off topic (I will be using unraid to store data on the ESXi VMs via NFS eventually, so maybe I'm a little on topic after all...)

 

First and foremost, I just learned that the onboard (software) RAID on my Intel MB isn't supported.  It has been suggested on another forum that the M1015 card will work.  So my first question is, do I need a specific firmware, like is required for unraid, or will any old Ebay card work?  My second question is, will it be totally transparent to ESXi?  I'm looking for my three 80GB disks to present as a single 147GB volume via RAID5, and then configure VMs from there... Am I doing OK so far or am I already screwed up?

 

Any other cheap RAID card (low profile) that are known to work?  This is for a test system initially so I don't want to break the bank.

 

Thanks to all.

I believe an m1015 will work. But really you should get a card with a battery backup module to avoid issues (or at lest have a good ups for the entire machine with shutdown routine) if using raid 5. Depends on the speed you want to get out if the VMs running on the box.

 

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the M1015 has no cache memory. unless your raid is all SSD, the array will not perform very well..

Plus ,a card with a battery unit is really important. that allows you to turn on the write-back cache and gain a significant performance boost.

 

 

I have personally used the following cards for what your are asking:

Areca arc-1222 (needs a driver)

Areca ARC-1882I (needs a driver)

HP P400 (limited to 2TB drives and smaller) <these are dirt cheap (mine was $50 with battery a year ago). old, so performance is not the best for a production server.

HP-P410 (supports larger then 3TB Drives)

Dell Perc-5

 

 

If you already had and really wanted to use the m1015 and save some money.. you "could" create a ZFS array with an m1015 and host your ESXi hosts on that.

You would still need another datastore for that guest to live on. This is quite a bit more advanced and not as convenient as a stand alone hardware raid card.  However, the performance will be very similar.

 

whatever way you do it, I recommend some sort of a backup plan. raid is not a back up. It is just a form of redundancy for always available data (not counting raid 0). sometimes with a performance boost.

 

here is the official VMware HCL: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=io&releases=76&deviceTypes=12,13,14&page=1&display_interval=10&sortColumn=Partner&sortOrder=Asc

many cards not on this list unofficially work.

Just to add

 

If long term you will be using unraid as a vm on esxi you will need to ensure the chip set supports hardware pass thru

 

Not all boards / processors support the above

 

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