ESXi, Supermicro RAID & SATADOM RAID-ish?

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sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
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I use a Supermicro X10SRL-F motherboard with ESXi (vcenter VMUG etc)
I wanted to upgrade my old 64GB SATADOMS with a pair of 128GB SATADOMs in the powered yellow SATA sockets so created a mirrored raid array in the Intel RAID utility. When ESXi boots the drives dont appear as a RAID'ed pair but still as two single drives, even though the Intel RAID tool confirmed they are RAID pairs.

I actually realized something was wrong when I split the original 64GB and one drive is essentially blank, the other has all the VMs on etc.

Heres what Im presented with when creating a new storage volume is ESXi - see the two 128Gb drives, Im pretty sure they should appear as a unified and single drive.

esxi.local.lan - VMware ESXi 2018-02-03 22-38-30.png
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
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515
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Canada
Software RAID? Not happening...

Install windows on it, load up the driver during install and sure, windows will see the raid pair. I don't think ESXi has such driver support though, so will ignore anything on the disks and treat them separately :)
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
379
91
28
thanks, well, that was too good to be true. Thought I could use the onboard RAID to provide some redundancy for a pair of small SATADOMs to boot Napp-it AIO which in turn mounts the NFS shares etc but no joy - looks like I need a ESXi HCL RAID card - although how I attach SATADOMs is beyond me! Im running out of PCI slots and space!
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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DE
You can add a hardware raid-1 sata module like a Dawicontrol DC-5200 or similar or a raid-1 enclosure like a Raidsonic iR2420-2S-S2B or similar