How did I get here?

[IsNull]

I built a cheap home server for Hyper-V with an AMD Phenom II X4, a 970 series board, and 8GB of non ecc ram. I ran into problems trying to virtualize my favorite internet security gateway, Astaro, and decided to give esxi a try instead. Under Windows Server, I was using software raid with a pair of 1TB drives that I use for redundant storage, and I'm looking for a way to get the same functionality under esxi.

Looks like I have 2 choices. Option A is to buy a Dell Perc or equivalent that esxi supports and do hardware RAID1. Option B brings me to this thread, and requires buying a card that Solaris/OI/Nexenta support. I think my real concern is whether or not my system is sufficient to virtualize the storage platform and 4 or 5 VMs while using a single mirrored pair of drives for ZFS. Sounds dicey to me, so I would love some input before spending another $200 on a LSI card, breakout cable, and another 8GB of ram.

 

[gea]

I built a cheap home server for Hyper-V with an AMD Phenom II X4, a 970 series board, and 8GB of non ecc ram. I ran into problems trying to virtualize my favorite internet security gateway, Astaro, and decided to give esxi a try instead. Under Windows Server, I was using software raid with a pair of 1TB drives that I use for redundant storage, and I'm looking for a way to get the same functionality under esxi.

Looks like I have 2 choices. Option A is to buy a Dell Perc or equivalent that esxi supports and do hardware RAID1. Option B brings me to this thread, and requires buying a card that Solaris/OI/Nexenta support. I think my real concern is whether or not my system is sufficient to virtualize the storage platform and 4 or 5 VMs while using a single mirrored pair of drives for ZFS. Sounds dicey to me, so I would love some input before spending another $200 on a LSI card, breakout cable, and another 8GB of ram.

Depends if your system supports IOMMU without problems.
This is mandatory beside a second controller for a storage VM if you like
to build a ESXi box to virtualize a NAS/SAN together with other VM's -
each with nearly the same performance like on real hardware -
if you can attach disks directly via pass-through to your storage-VM

Your CPU power is enough, 16 GB RAM is also ok to start with