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Can you install ESXI on a Server with Intel SW (onboard) RAID-1?
randvegeta
Member, Host Rep
in General
I'm not all too familiar with VMWare/ESXI, but obviously someone people use it, and we have someone who wants it on one of our SuperMicro servers.
The server has 2x SSD of which we want to configure in RAID-1. The motherboard has an onboard RAID (basically software RAID controller). After configuring the RAID-1 array, ESXI shows both disks individually rather than as a single drive.
Seems ESXI does not recognise Intel's SW raid.
Since I don't have a spare RAID card available, I am hoping there would be a solution to use the onboard tools already available.
Does anyone have any experience with this?
Thanks in advance.
Comments
ESXI doesn't support software raid.
There aren't any software raid solutions for ESXI.
Seriously? That's a bit of a shame.
Install on one drive, see if the SW RAID replicates to ssd2.
Then you have backups
Raid on servers is usually handled via hardware ... If you are trying to accomplish this, get FreeNAS or something and then NFS in.
I remember some time ago someone on vmware-forum claimed he made ESXi to run on sw-raid (somehow compiled drivers and inserted into esxi-image), but performance was terrible. It was caused by ESXi specific design: ESXi does NOT do any disk-caching. It does not sacrifice single bit of RAM for disk-cache. It counts on RAID-controller's cache (or NAS)...
Onboard BIOS RAID is a bad idea anyhow.. when it works, it's.. iffy. You'll handle much better with your standard Adaptec controller or similar. Software RAID is even suggested on Linux over BIOS(Fake)RAID.