VMware vSphere

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  • 1.  Raid Controller Driver setup

    Posted Jul 21, 2009 05:37 PM

    Is there anyway to istall a raid cotroller driver when installing esxi? I see no options to do it as the system boots up and all I get is an error that no storage device is found and my system will reboot. Is there someway to "slipstream" the driver so the installation of esxi recognizes it?



  • 2.  RE: Raid Controller Driver setup

    Posted Jul 21, 2009 07:21 PM

    Ok from what I have been able to read it appears that if ESXI doesn't recognize your hardware at boot you are out luck baring any of the "work arounds" people have figured out.

    My raid controller is a SiL3132 sata II. Does anyone know any workarounds for this particular model?



  • 3.  RE: Raid Controller Driver setup

    Posted Jul 21, 2009 08:07 PM

    ESX nor ESXi is meant to work with soft-RAID cards. As for your card, if you really need to use it, the only way is to hack the oem.tgz file. There's plenty of info on www.vm-help.com about it. But you will never get RAID functionality out of it.



  • 4.  RE: Raid Controller Driver setup

    Posted Jul 21, 2009 08:12 PM

    What is a good fairly inexpensive card that will support raid with sata II? Most of the ones I found on the HCL were $500-$600.



  • 5.  RE: Raid Controller Driver setup

    Posted Jul 21, 2009 08:23 PM

    From what I've read, a lot of people are buying Perc 5/i cards off of Ebay. I think you can get some 3Ware cards to work as well but not 100% sure on that. Just read it from a forum post a while back.



  • 6.  RE: Raid Controller Driver setup

    Posted Jul 23, 2009 05:42 PM

    Granted, I'm not exactly answering your question, but for the Poor Man's Solution, I used a cheap $20 Rosewill card from Newegg. It has the Sil3512 chipset. You can read more about compatible storage controllers here:

    Whitebox HCL

    This is the $20 card I purchased, and just got ESXi 4 installed on.

    Newegg

    The reason I said that I'm not really answering your question....is that this card works, but not in RAID mode. My disks are recognized, just not in a RAID configuration.