May 5, 201412 yr hi guy's just found out ESXi 5.5 doesnt support software raid.. so i'm now looking for an additional raid card for my VM's. i already have a 24 channel raid card i'll be passing trough for unRaid. looking at this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816129107 but not sure of there are better alternatives around that price point..
May 6, 201412 yr Author no recommendations? looking for a card i can use to mirror my ESXi datastore drives
May 6, 201412 yr I have no experience with the card you linked to but I have used an M1015 to do a mirror on a couple SSD's that were the ESXi datastore. It worked just fine and was easy enough to set up.
May 6, 201412 yr I use an IBM 5015 card in my esxi server, but I've also used a HP P400 and P410 card as well and they all work great. You can pick up a P410 card from serversupply for like $60-$120. All of these cards support 8 hard drives and different raid versions.
May 6, 201412 yr Author I have no experience with the card you linked to but I have used an M1015 to do a mirror on a couple SSD's that were the ESXi datastore. It worked just fine and was easy enough to set up. do you get a speed issue with this since esxi doesnt cache? I use an IBM 5015 card in my esxi server, but I've also used a HP P400 and P410 card as well and they all work great. You can pick up a P410 card from serversupply for like $60-$120. All of these cards support 8 hard drives and different raid versions. do you have your card crossflashed?
May 6, 201412 yr I don't use my raid card for anything on unraid other than the boot file, it's not passed through or anything. I don't even think the P400/410 cards are even seen by unraid actually. I only use the raid card for my datastores so if I lose a drive I don't lose the VM. I don't have them crossflashed or anything. I have other supermicro controller cards that pass through my drives to unraid. I don't experience any speed issues but I am running sata2 drives on that array so technically they are slow per se but I don't see it on any of my VMs running. Hope this helps...
May 6, 201412 yr do you get a speed issue with this since esxi doesnt cache? Honestly I don't know. I built 3 servers for a company using Some 480GB Intel SSD's in the RAID one configuration mentioned. I know they used it for datastore and they must have been happy with it. They ordered one server configured, had it for about a month and then ordered 2 more. Have not had any support requests from them. My older ESXi server runs an Areca-1222 card with battery backup unit. It runs a RAID 5 of 4 1TB drives as my datastore. I did that entirely for the safety of the VM's and me only having to push a new drive into place and not rebuild a VM.
May 14, 201412 yr Author so after looking around and doing some reading.. particularly this https://communities.vmware.com/thread/395607 i think i'll got with the P410 because of the cache abilities..
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.