Budget RAID card for ESXi?

dave-lew99 · 28 Jan 2010 at 18:10

Hello,

I'm after a budget SATA raid card which will work with ESXi, at the moment all i can find which is reasonable is an Adaptec one for £160 which is on the VMware HCL. It only needs to be 2 ports and do RAID-1.

Any recommendations?

rz30 · 28 Jan 2010 at 20:36

I would check the bay for a cheap one.

s0ck · 28 Jan 2010 at 20:40

Are there are 3ware cards on there?

atomiser · 28 Jan 2010 at 20:49

fairly sure someone on here was selling a couple of esxi rigs that used 4 port adaptec cards which you could pick up for about £50. he was using them for 3 drives in raid5, but you could easily setup 2 in raid1 also. may even do a 2 port for cheaper, since i'm sure i also saw a 6 port for about an extra £10. the bay, or possibly the for sale section here, is your friend.

dmsims · 28 Jan 2010 at 21:00

3Ware

rz30 · 28 Jan 2010 at 21:21

The highpoint rocketraids are quite good, but a 2 port comes i about £80.

dave-lew99 · 28 Jan 2010 at 21:41

I was about to say the 3Ware 9650SE looked ideal, but it looks a right pain to install it - you can't install the ESXi install to a raid array, i don't want a primary boot drive that does nothing.

http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=15548

Maybe i'll look at the adaptec again...

Yamahahahahaha · 28 Jan 2010 at 22:00

It makes sense to have ESXi running on another drive / partition.

I run mine off USB sticks, not ideal but it's quick enough to clone them occasionally for backups.

Maybe look at getting a second hand perc5/i? Or anything second hand would do really...

dave-lew99 · 28 Jan 2010 at 22:38

Well it's for the office, so if its going to cost £300 then so be it, i just wanted options that's all.

Second hand isn't really suitable - warranty and all that.

Yamahahahahaha · 28 Jan 2010 at 23:19

Oh, I assumed it was for home.

Yeah £300 will definitely get you a decent RAID card.

Is there no recommended model of RAID card with the type of server you're using?

RSR · 29 Jan 2010 at 10:07

Also using a 3rd party RAID card in a HP server will affect your warranty, strictly speaking.

I personally normally stick with HP RAID cards in our servers. However, if it’s a 3rd party one id normally choose a Adaptec card

axer · 29 Jan 2010 at 10:12

I just tried installing Vmware ESXi on a Dell R200 with a 3ware 9650SE-2LP and can confirm that it doesn't pick up the card.

I couldn't be bothered arsing around bodging it to work as the solution would be "unsupported" so just went for XenServer instead which is also free and does more out of the box (such as moving VM's between pools etc).

madman045 · 29 Jan 2010 at 11:31

axer said:
I just tried installing Vmware ESXi on a Dell R200 with a 3ware 9650SE-2LP and can confirm that it doesn't pick up the card.

I couldn't be bothered arsing around bodging it to work as the solution would be "unsupported" so just went for XenServer instead which is also free and does more out of the box (such as moving VM's between pools etc).

Did you try this out of interest?

http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=15548

dave-lew99 · 30 Jan 2010 at 10:33

We're going to go for the Adaptec 2405 - we used to use the 3405 for customers and it appears to be the same but without RAID-5.

Now i've found a solution, just have to find the right time to spend the money!

I didn't like XenServer for a few reasons:

- no role based access controls (i'm giving the Dev staff their own read-only VM each)
- It wouldn't let me put the management interface on it's own VLAN
- I'm more familier with VMWare and if i'm the one who has to look after it (when it's not actually a part of my job) then i'm going to go with what i know.