Greetings All,
I have been reading many of the forums and great articles by mobilenvidia for months. I purchased an IBM M1015 and crosflashed it to the LSI IT/IR firmware and currently have it running in my ESXI 5.5 hypervisor box with 32gb of ram and a haswell 4770s i7 with a couple 2TB seagate spinners in RAID 0. I also have a 256gb Crucial M4 for zippy VMs. (Planning on getting a couple Samsung 840 Evo 1TB in the future for RAID 1) Without any cache obviously RAID 1/0 isn't all that great and it has no battery backup, but it was great to learn on and actually helped me on a job with a Dell server later.
I have tried really hard to read through many of the available articles and narrow down an upgrade but I end up feeling rather overwhelmed.
Prerequisites: I want to upgrade to a new raid card with 512mb-1TB of cache memory, have cachecade/fastpath so I can do SSD caching as well as a battery backup/capacitor as well as support ESXI 5.5. I am just running RAID for my vsphere server and VMs, and am not interested in doing passthrough or setting up a NAS. I have a budget of about $300, maybe a bit more for a good deal. I want two SAS ports internally for two sets of forward breakout cables to expand later. I will used this as a learning platform for trying different things and expand my knowledge of RAID.
I have been watching the IBM M5016 cards but i'm not sure if that is the best option because I don't think it supports some of the above prerequisites and after reading a few articles it seems I can do better although I do like the capacitor vs a BBU that wears out. Any insights or thoughts are much appreciated.
Thanks!
I have been reading many of the forums and great articles by mobilenvidia for months. I purchased an IBM M1015 and crosflashed it to the LSI IT/IR firmware and currently have it running in my ESXI 5.5 hypervisor box with 32gb of ram and a haswell 4770s i7 with a couple 2TB seagate spinners in RAID 0. I also have a 256gb Crucial M4 for zippy VMs. (Planning on getting a couple Samsung 840 Evo 1TB in the future for RAID 1) Without any cache obviously RAID 1/0 isn't all that great and it has no battery backup, but it was great to learn on and actually helped me on a job with a Dell server later.
I have tried really hard to read through many of the available articles and narrow down an upgrade but I end up feeling rather overwhelmed.
Prerequisites: I want to upgrade to a new raid card with 512mb-1TB of cache memory, have cachecade/fastpath so I can do SSD caching as well as a battery backup/capacitor as well as support ESXI 5.5. I am just running RAID for my vsphere server and VMs, and am not interested in doing passthrough or setting up a NAS. I have a budget of about $300, maybe a bit more for a good deal. I want two SAS ports internally for two sets of forward breakout cables to expand later. I will used this as a learning platform for trying different things and expand my knowledge of RAID.
I have been watching the IBM M5016 cards but i'm not sure if that is the best option because I don't think it supports some of the above prerequisites and after reading a few articles it seems I can do better although I do like the capacitor vs a BBU that wears out. Any insights or thoughts are much appreciated.
Thanks!