ESXi 7.x/8.x HBA/Storage question.

[awedio]

Say you have a single SMicro host (single node) with LSI 9300 + 8x SSds. (ESXi is installed on a separate disk).

How do you "pool" the storage to make a large datastore?

 

[Rand__]

U can't.
You need to use a hw raid card or use a software raid function. Which is why AIO's with ZFS based storage are so common

 

[awedio]

Let's talk software raid, what options are available?

 

[Rand__]

on esxi? nothing. I was talking about something like intel vroc. Not sure its an option in ur case.

But why not pass through and expose back?

 

[awedio]

I meant what 3rd party software raid options are available?

Pass through/expose back: too complex, to many moving parts. I like simple..

 

[Rand__]

none that i am aware off except vroc at bios level.

 

[ano]

vSAN

 

[Rand__]

not on a single host though

 

[BloodKnight7]

Software level raid for esxi inside the same host is almost non-existant. Hardware raid is the straightforward "affordable" way to go, just make sure to verify the card in the compatibility matrix and you should be golden.

 

[Dev_Mgr]

If you don't need any redundancy, you could do a 1-host vSAN via CLI. But 1 SSD will be 'lost' to being a cache drive (should use a higher DWPD type drive (preferably 3-10 DWPD)), and if 1 drive fails, assume you lost everything.

Creating a vSAN Cluster without a vCenter Server | MrVSAN -> use step 2 and 4 to create a 1-node cluster and claim the needed disks.

Personally, unless you want to create a single disk for a VM that's larger than your largest storage device, I'd just go with multiple individual drives w/o raid and spread your VMs or your VM's disks across the multiple drives.

If you want redundancy, I'd suggest to look at a proper hardware raid controller (e.g. LSI or Adaptec solution).