ESXi 5.5 RAID card

xy16644

xy16644

xy16644

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I am wanting to turn my server at home into an ESXi 5.5 host. From what I have read ESXi does not do caching so using local storage without a RAID card can be slow.

Therefore I am on the hunt for a good RAID card and don't mind spending some bucks on it. Trouble is I have no idea where to start...have been looking at:

MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i

or:

MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i

I do need 8 channels as I'll be connecting 6 drives initially. Four will be SATA SSD drives and two will be SATA hard drives.

Are these good cards? I like to 9271-8i as it has 1GB cache and PCI Express 3.0.

If these are old cards or not a good choice can anyone recommend a good RAID card for use in ESXi? Performance must be decent as I will be running up to 12 virtual machines on the SSD drives and having good IO is important. And yes, these VMs will be live and used to host email etc.

Thanks!
 
With SSDs a RAID card is not going to improve performance at all; in fact, it will slow things down. RAID cards that are affordable were designed for spinning disks, and will impose a significant performance bottleneck on multiple SSDs in an array. In other words, any card that has been on the market for over a year, and doesn't cost in the high hundreds/thousands, just won't have that kind of throughput.
 
Ah, I see this is for production use. In that case you do want RAID, because high availability and resiliency are more important than price and performance.
 
I only use LSI cards for internal ESXi RAID use and the MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i looks like a good bet, you'll appreciate the additional RAM with your SSDs. I believe PCIe 3.0 would only be needed if you had 7-8 SSDs connected as a PCIe 2.0 8x slot gives you 4GB/sec of bandwidth.

The type of RAID you require is largely irrelevant as they all support levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60 out of the box.

Channels only come in multiples of 4 (i.e. 4,8,16) so 8 is the minimum you require. Each mini-SAS connector can drive 4x SAS/SATA drives.

You'll need 2x sFF-8087 to 4x SATA (Internal Mini SAS to SATA) cables as the cards will most likely not come with any.

If you get a card without the optional MegaRAID CacheVault flash cache protection module (LSICVM01) or MegaRAID LSIiBBU09 intelligent battery backup module (LSIiBBU09) then by default the card works in 'Write-through' mode and you'll get horrible performance. You can however force 'Write-Back' mode though the card's bios utility to get your performance back. For 'actual' production use then one of the above is a prerequisite though.
 
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I use a simple HBA, which I pass-through to a FreeNAS vm, on which I build a raid-z array. Works extremely well, plus you get to play around with creating LUNs.

Edit: just noticed this is for production. Above is not recommended for production.
 
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