Dedicated RAID card + ESXI5.5

GSAELiTe

GSAELiTe

GSAELiTe

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4 Jan 2004
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I'm in the process of planning a home ESXI server and just doing some research into hardware etc. Its become apparent that in versions ESXI5.5 and above there is no support for software "fake" raid controllers in many mainstream desktop motherboards.

So looks like i need to purchase a dedicated RAID card, ok ...

I'm getting confused though with people saying i should pass the card through to a VM on the ESXI host (i'm guessing there referring to VT-d pass-through)

I was just going to use the card to RAID a couple of hard-drives and install ESXI on the array, so if a HDD failed, i still would be able to boot ESXI.

I guess i could still use the array as a local datastore for my VM's too, im obviously been thick and missing something, can anyone shed any light on what im overlooking?
 
I've had a think about this, whats wrong with just installing ESXI on an SSD and then create a RAID array and use that as storage for the VM's?

Whats the big fuss about passing the RAID card through to a VM and running freeNAS?

Anyone have any ideas?
 
ESXi is will load to RAM and happily run from there so you can simply download an ESX ISO install image and write that to a USB stick.

Configure your RAID array first from the ROM utilily (assuming your using a dedicated HBA supported by VMWare). Boot the USB stick and during the initial setup of ESXi select the USB stick you just booted from (remember ESXi is designed to run from RAM!) as the install medium. After it's finished installing it will now restart and load from the USB stick.

Once booted and connected to from either the vCenter Client (you can use a browser to access the ESXi server after installing to download this) and then you can configure your VMWare datastores for running your VMs.

Basically keep the OS separate from the datastore which makes upgrades easy in the future.
 
Last edited:
GSAELiTe said:
Ok that makes sense, but i cant figure out why somebody would want to pass the card through to a VM running something like FreeNAS?
Click to expand...

Because if you are using ZFS, you want it to have direct access to the disks. You do not want to run it on top of RAID, so people using ESXI pass through a controller to a VM which has no RAID functions (eg LSI cards in IT mode).
 
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