Hardware for new ESXI Build

[jschwartz]

Finally ready to retire my 6+ year old Asus P5B-VM DO with a new setup, and wanted to try my hand at virtualization, running (1) Unraid (2) Plex / sab / etc (3) ipcop or pfSense and (4) Minecraft (4) WinServer 2012

 

My proposed setup would bring my 13 (so far) drives from my current setup over to the new build.

 

Case: Norco 4224

MB: Supermicro X10SLH-F http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182822

Ram: 16GB Samsung ECC Unbuffered http://www.superbiiz.com/desc.php?name=D38GE1600S

CPU: Intel Xeon (Haswell) E3-1240v3

HBA: 2 x M1015

PSU: Corsair AX760

 

If I expand my Unraid pool past 16 drives, I would look at the intel expander. I've done the math, and it seems like going M1015 => 8 Drives and M1015 => Intel => 16 drives (2 in / 4 out on the intel) all would stay ahead of theoretical max of spinning disks. ( Fairly certain I've just talked myself into starting with one m1015 => intel unless someone sees an advantage I don't)

 

The part I'm really not sure about is the datastore for esxi. Can I just mirror two drives (or two sets of 2) on the motherboard SATA ports? I have an AOC-SASLP-MV8 from the old system I can pull if necessary (if the MB ports are not usable), but I'd rather not.

 

Thoughts? Thanks!

[BobPhoenix]

I don't believe the SASLP-MV8 is supported in ESXi for datastore drives only as a pass through device using the hack.

 

ESXi should be able to use the MB Sata ports but I don't know if it supports a mirrored raid off of them.  It would have to be ESXi doing the mirrored raid because any raid capabilities claimed by the MB chipset would all be via software (which would have to be ESXi installable).  So if you want mirrored datastores you MIGHT be limited to using an M1015 in IR mode instead of IT mode to do it.  But I could be wrong.

 

In any case I have a single drive as my datastore and I regularly backup the Virtual drives on it.  Granted I do that from within the OS running off the VM rather than from the backup solutions for ESXi but I do back them up regularly.  You might look at doing that if you are not going to be able to mirror your datastore drives.  It doesn't take very long to setup ESXi from scratch if a datastore crashes - assuming of course that you have good backups of the virtual drives stored on the datastores.