January 9, 201511 yr Okay, so Christmas brought me the build I have always wanted, and at the same time, My Windows daily driver PC has died. This has got me on the road to building "the PC to rule them all" kind of thing. I know this has been debated both ways, but I am not here to debate this, I am doing it one way or the other. I have put the new PC together, and installed ESXi on a WD 500GB hard drive. My motherboard has 10 sata ports on the MOBO already. I know that passing SATA ports through RAW is a task and royal pain in the A, but I am reading that it can be done. The resources I have found are Here: http://www.ostricher.com/2012/09/setting-up-unraid-vm/ and Here : http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/ After looking into this, I know that if I do not use this "workaround" method, that my SMART stats and Monitoring capabilities (drive spin down and temp status) will be gone. What is the thought here on what I should do? Is it worth going through all this trouble to map these drives as RAW or should I just Virtualize these drives for the UNRAID VM? Keep in mind when you weigh in that I have 5TB worth of data currrently on my UNRAID box (a 15 year old PC that could die any day now) and moving the data to a new array would be a painful process. I really do not wish to lose all the media I have worked to obtain. Thoughts? Brandon
January 9, 201511 yr You would be much better off getting a controller card and passing the whole thing through.
January 9, 201511 yr +1 with StevenD I'm running ESXi 5.1 and passing through a controller is so easy and you lose zero function. m1015 in IT Mode is what I'm using. There are others out there. Good luck!
January 12, 201511 yr I'm running ESXi 5.5 Update 2 with an IBM M1015 flashed to IT mode passed through to the Unraid VM and everything working sweet. Definitely the way to go!
January 13, 201511 yr Author Thank you for all the comments guys, I guess I will do that. Those cards look a little expensive, but I will find a way to beg the wife for more parts . If I am reading it correctly, one of those cards you mentioned could hold 8 of my drives with this cable right? http://www.amazon.com/HighPoint-Internal-Mini-SAS-SFF8087-Int-MS-1M4S/dp/B001L9DU88/ref=pd_cp_e_0
January 13, 201511 yr Author Also, a bit off topic, but I am trying to run Windows on this same box using GPU passthrough. I got the GPU passthrough to work, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to use the secondary keyboard and mouse for my VMs. To clarify, the mouse and keyboard I want to use, is the same one that is connected to the ESXI host. I want to manage the other VMs from the one windows VM running on my ESXI box. I tried passing the USB controllers and getting the mouse and keyboards to work in the VM, but it just won't show up in the VM. Am I missing something? I am wondering if a USB controller card would work for that as well.
February 11, 201511 yr Dumb question here guys, but I'm assuming you could pass multiple cards right? Like in a situation where you have multiple cards connecting your unraid drives. Or would it work better if all unraid drives were connected to the same card?
February 11, 201511 yr Dumb question here guys, but I'm assuming you could pass multiple cards right? Like in a situation where you have multiple cards connecting your unraid drives. Or would it work better if all unraid drives were connected to the same card? You can pass thru more cards..
February 11, 201511 yr Author I guess I should update this post since it has been awhile. I have went out and bought an LSI RAID card flashed to IT mode. I found it on ebay from somebody who flashes and sells these cards, and he had very good reviews. As I have not flashed one yet, and I was in a hurry to get this thing built quickly, I went ahead and bought it and everything is working great. I am very happy with my new build and my windows 8.1 virtual is booting up nicely as well. I had a little struggle with drivers at first, but all in all, it worked out smoothly. I currently have 6 drives on my unRAID array totaling around 10TB of storage capacity and I have 2 more drives I can add to this RAID card when the time comes. I am very grateful for all the suggestions. I will no doubt be buying another card when the 2 slots I have left on this card I just bought are full. It was much easier to just pass the whole card through to the unRAID VM as opposed to RDM of all the drives. It booted right up just as it should. When I boot my ESXi host box up, it fires up my unRAID VM and my dual monitors fire up with the windows 8.1 OS and the sound, video card, and several USB ports that are passed through to the Windows VM all work great. I couldn't ask for better!
February 13, 201511 yr I will no doubt be buying another card when the 2 slots I have left on this card I just bought are full. It was much easier to just pass the whole card through to the unRAID VM as opposed to RDM of all the drives. That's awesome it worked out for you. You received great advice! Another option, should you either not have a space slot, or just want a different method of expanding your drive capabilities, would be the use of a SAS expander (a popular one used is the Intel RES2SV240). The drawback is that it effectively limits the bandwidth available to a portion of the drives (that are running off the expander), but it's a simple method to give you 24 drives in total when paired with the M1015. I picked up one of these when my Supermicro SAS card died on me, and I couldn't be happier.
February 13, 201511 yr Author Oh, that's not nice of you to show me this... Now I want it! My wife will not be happy about this! <
February 13, 201511 yr I will no doubt be buying another card when the 2 slots I have left on this card I just bought are full. It was much easier to just pass the whole card through to the unRAID VM as opposed to RDM of all the drives. That's awesome it worked out for you. You received great advice! Another option, should you either not have a space slot, or just want a different method of expanding your drive capabilities, would be the use of a SAS expander (a popular one used is the Intel RES2SV240). The drawback is that it effectively limits the bandwidth available to a portion of the drives (that are running off the expander), but it's a simple method to give you 24 drives in total when paired with the M1015. I picked up one of these when my Supermicro SAS card died on me, and I couldn't be happier. I have a SAS expander (RES2SV240) and have it setup to support 24 drives from a single M1015 controller. With 19 drives connected I saw a 25% reduction in parity check speeds using the SAS expander. Basically I was getting the same speeds as my PCI-X (AOC-SAT2-MV8) controller on my X7SBE MB with PCI-X slots. Which was still plenty fast enough for me and allowed me to have all of the drives run off a single controller and PCIe x8 slot on my X9SCM-F MB. The other slots were used by other VMs.
February 13, 201511 yr Do the passthrough. 100$ are totally worth the hassle free setup and peace of mind
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