May 5, 201511 yr Currently running three VMs using one hard disk. Looking to add a fourth and probably fifth VM. pfsense, untangle, Windows 7, and two ubuntu's. The only thing stopping me from consolidating all of my servers onto one big, bad esxi machine, is a disk failure taking down everything at once. I'm looking at options here. I haven't used legit hardware RAID since the SCSI-3 days. Although back then, I could fill up an array, create it in the hardware RAID controller's BIOS, and the OS (whatever OS i chose) simply saw one great big huge disk volume and didn't know any better. If an individual disk failed, I got an orange LED on the front of the array. Swapped the disk, and the controller rebuilt it, and life was good again. All with zero downtime. Back then that sort of system cost between $5-10k and I was mostly using Sun stuff on the unix side and Adapted stuff on the Windows (NT/2000) side. I'm wondering if I can do something similar these days with four cheap 2.5" disks and a used RAID controller off flea-bay (M1015 properly flashed?) running RAID5. My biggest requirements are that the controller can tell me if a disk fails, and that esxi will see one huge disk volume for VM storage with minimal fuss (ie no crazy tweaks or fancy driver installs, I'm still learning the basics after all) Comments welcome.
May 5, 201511 yr You could use something like the M1015, but you can also buy some salvage, or off-lease Dell or HP cards that will give you much better performance. For the price, I think you cant beat the HP P410s. You will need to get the proper cables though. http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-462919-001-Smart-Array-P410-SAS-Raid-Controller-Card-w-512MB-Cache-Battery-/111655681411?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item19ff327d83 I used an Areca 1680 (in an OpenFiler SAN) for my ESXi storage, but the Areca cards with additional cache will cost quite a bit more.
May 5, 201511 yr Author Interesting and thanks for the link. Will the standard break-out cables (like are used with the IBM card) work with that HP? http://www.ebay.com/itm/462862-B21-HP-SMART-ARRAY-P410-W-256MB-CACHE-462919-001-013233-001-RAID-CARD-/171762910430?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27fdde04de That's a stellar deal, even after I buy a $20 battery, compared to the M1015. Thanks for the heads up.
May 5, 201511 yr That's indeed a stellar deal !! Fortunately they had more than one for sale, so the one I just bought won't keep you from getting one
May 5, 201511 yr Is this the same thing on Amazon? http://www.amazon.com/HP-P410-Smart-Array-Controlle/dp/B001S2PZ5O
May 5, 201511 yr Sure looks like it => guess that must be the going rate for that card. I picked it up just because it's only $40 ... not sure if I'll need it anytime soon, but I'll add it to my collection of "too good to pass up" spare parts [You'd think I'd learn to stop adding to that stash !!] My plan is to build a nice new "super server" later this year, and I'm leaning towards using ESXi with UnRAID virtualized rather than a native v6 setup with KVM => that may change, but just in case it doesn't, this will be a nice card to hold the VM's in ESXi [With UnRAID providing the main storage for data].
May 5, 201511 yr You could use something like the M1015, but you can also buy some salvage, or off-lease Dell or HP cards that will give you much better performance. For the price, I think you cant beat the HP P410s. You will need to get the proper cables though. http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-462919-001-Smart-Array-P410-SAS-Raid-Controller-Card-w-512MB-Cache-Battery-/111655681411?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item19ff327d83 I used an Areca 1680 (in an OpenFiler SAN) for my ESXi storage, but the Areca cards with additional cache will cost quite a bit more. Notice the battery (highly recommended) is dated 08/09, nearly 5 years old. That is the most troublesome part, and a replacement is about $60 if you can find them. I can confirm with firmware 6.40 and 6.60 these support 6TB and 8TB drives. This listing includes 512MB cache. For home users I recommending avoid hardware raid because when the card fails, a replacement is often hard to find. Case in point, the p410 is already an older card, 5 years from now when/if it dies, even ebay may not have them listed.
May 5, 201511 yr My current ESXi server is running an Areca 1222 in RAID 5. That is on ESXi 4.1 if I remember correctly. I am slowly building myself a new server running ESXi 5.5 (probably go to 6.0) with a RAID 10 of 4x2TB drives.
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