Cheap and easy SATA card for ESXi 5.0

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PigLover

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Looking for a SATA card compatible with ESXi 5.0. I am building a new system with 11 drives using passthrough of a 9211-8i and the on-board SATA ports. Unfortunately the passthrough in ESXi 5.0 requires me to pass through the entire on-board SATA controller, meaning I am left with no on-board ports for a boot/datastore drive.

Can't use USB boot because I also need a small datastore for the SE11/napp-it VM. I'm testing with the datastore on my existing SAN but this system eventually needs to be completely stand alone.

Just need any SATA card with drivers for ESXi 5.0. Don't care if its PCI, PCI-X or PCIe. Performance doesn't matter at all. Cheap is really good.

Suggestions?
 
You should select one from the compatibility list of ESXi. I would get something like a LSI 1068e base controller like the Intel SASUC8i. While those are not the cheapest controllers, they will work with ESXi. On the other hand you could passthrough such a controller and use the onboard for ESXi.

Passthrough will always work only with whole PCIe devices, after all only one OS can "own" a controller. Single SATA port "passthrough" can only work with an emulation layer between host and guest.
 
M1015 flash w. LSI IT mode firmware. high reliability, compatible, cheap, fast, can handle 3TB drives .
 
davros123 said:
M1015 flash w. LSI IT mode firmware. high reliability, compatible, cheap, fast, can handle 3TB drives .
Click to expand...

He already has a card which he will be using for his 11 drives (9211-8i and the on-board SATA ports).

You could try a pci sata raid controller with the sil3114 chipset. It worked well on 4.1 and "should" work with 5.0. I'll report back once I get my hands on one. I bought mine for $13 shipped from amazon.

I advise against this if you're not going to mirror the vm drive. http://www.nexenta.org/boards/1/topics/1775#message-2152 <- last post
 
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kidchunks said:
He already has a card which he will be using for his 11 drives (9211-8i and the on-board SATA ports).

You could try a pci sata raid controller with the sil3114 chipset. It worked well on 4.1 and "should" work with 5.0. I'll report back once I get my hands on one. I bought mine for $13 shipped from amazon.

I advise against this if you're not going to mirror the vm drive. http://www.nexenta.org/boards/1/topics/1775#message-2152 <- last post
Click to expand...

@kidchunks: thank you. Glad somebody took the time to actually read the question before parroting a response. I'll look for 3114 based cards and give it a try. The two cards I have are Sil-3124 based and they are not supported :(
 
Just received my card today (what are the odds?). Popped it in my esxi 5 box and it recognized the drives no problem. You can purchase it from here.

Of course with the sil3114's the raid function won't work. Thought they would in esxi5 given it recognizes the card as a "Raid Controller". Passing single drives on it works perfectly. ;)

Good luck with your all-in-one build!
 
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kidchunks said:
Just received my card today (what are the odds?). Popped it in my esxi 5 box and it recognized the drives no problem. You can purchase it from here.

Of course with the sil3114's the raid function won't work. Thought they would in esxi5 given it recognizes the card as a "Raid Controller". Passing single drives on it works perfectly. ;)

Good luck with your all-in-one build!
Click to expand...

Hi, how is your card working for you in ESXi? I have a high end ESXi 5 U1 install running off of USB drive on an ASUS P9X79 WS motherboard and have been looking for a SATA card so that I can use the I/O passthrough on a Server 2008 R2 vm. Have you had any performance issues or bugs with the card aside from the RAID not working?
 
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kidchunks said:
Of course with the sil3114's the raid function won't work. Thought they would in esxi5 given it recognizes the card as a "Raid Controller". Passing single drives on it works perfectly.
Click to expand...

ESXi only recognizes actual hardware-based RAID devices. Most low-end and motherboard "RAID" controllers aren't fully hardware-based. They're a combination of hardware and a software driver; often referred to as soft RAID.
 
I've been following this thread, but I'm a bit lost as a VM n00b. I see you mention the sil3114 card as working, but this is only allowing access to the drive itself, not RAID functionality?

I'm hoping to do a simple RAID 1 mirror of two big drives with both ESXi 5.1 and all of my images on them.

Can someone recommend a cheap (< $100) SATA RAID card that will allow me to do that?

TIA.
 
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