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?

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...

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.

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.