Esxi5 raid query

-fedexer-

-fedexer-

-fedexer-

Associate
Joined
9 Sep 2010
Posts
297
Location
Glasgow
Hi guys,

I'm about to setup my own home server using Esxi5 as the base, now the problem is I want to run my drives in raid for some redundancy, however I've been doing some reading and I know that you cannot use the motherboard raid as it counts as a software raid which Esxi doesn't support.

I cannot afford to go for a hardware raid option as it is currently too expensive, now I've been doing some reading and apparently it's possible to still use a software raid from inside the vm's, but with little detail as to how this is done other than set up each disk as a datastore and pass them to the vms?

Do i setup the drives as a datastore, pass them to the vms (i assume a datastore can be given to more than one vm?) and then come back out, into the bios and setup the raid there? Or must I use some software in each vm to create the raid, in which case how would I go about making sure the raid was the same for each vm?

As you can tell I'm a bit lost here, and new to virtualization, but want the ability to still have a raid for redundancy between my vms...

Hopefully someone can shed some light here in simplistic terms?

Cheers!
 
I should add that my intention is to have a seperate disk from the raid where the OS etc will be stored.

I will need to test this tomorrow as I'm waiting for a delivery of equipment currently, this is pre-emptive to me trying the install, from what i've read there shouldn't be a problem with the raid being in-place during the install as esxi just sees the raid as seperate disks, but then what, would that still mean in the vms the raid is still solid but not in esxi?
 
Uhtred, I'm assuming because you use DRM to pass them to Freenas that any other vm's on your server cannot access those drives nor that raid?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom