Cheap Hardware RAID Card for Dev ESXi Box

You're thinking more of ESX than ESXi. Currently the cheapest SAS RAID (w/ parity) controller out there is indeed the PERC 5/i which works with ESX 4.0 out of the box.
I see you've put SQL in, which I'm assuming is pretty significant VM out of the others. For that just make sure it's kept on a separate HDD/array and away from all other VMs and absolutely no RAID5 or 6 with a SQL DB.
If you don't intend to use any RAID for any of your other VMs, then just use built-in SATA on mobo. Or a cheap SAS HBA like DELL SAS 6/ir if you need RAID 1 or 1+0.

For a single node baremetal hypervisor box I'd currently go with something like:
Xeon X3440
ASUS P7P55D Deluxe
Intel Pro/1000 PT Dual
4x 4GB DDR3-1066 ECC (should be ~$110-150/module)
DELL PERC 5/i or 6/i (make sure you get a BBU with it)


Here's my old setup for reference:
AMD Phenom II 945
MSI 790FX-GD70
4x 2GB DDR3-1333 ECC
6x ST31000340NS
2x 146GB 15K.5 (picked up dirt cheap)
DELL PERC 5/i 512MB (with LSI firmware)
Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad (dual Realtek GbE on mobo can be made functional with this)
[The platform was chosen to be eventually used as a SAN hence the somewhat non-ideal setup]

This is the new setup (the now completed SAN):
AMD Phenom II 945
MSI 790FX-GD70
4x 2GB DDR3-1333 ECC
8x ST31000340NS
2x 146GB 15K.5
2x DELL PERC 6/i
1x DELL PERC 6/E (currently not utilised until DAS enclosure arrives)
Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad

And the two ESXi hosts:
Supermicro Twin 1U
2x X8DTT-F mobo
4x Xeon L5530
6x 4GB DDR3-1333 ECC

thanks for the reply, why do suggest I'm thinking more of ESX than ESXi?

I haven't 100% decided which way I'm going yet - might run up Hyper-V just for some basic testing before it's blown away and replaced with ESXi4 or ESX4

I'm leaning towards ESXi due to the smaller footprint and resource requirements.

well, last time I looked, esxi was free, esx was commercial (paid). That could be one good reason to go with esxi.

sorry I'm aware of the difference in price, what I was trying to refer to was what technical differences or limitations I may encounter by running ESXi rather than full ESX4.0? or I guess more specifically what impact that has when choosing the hardware to run my environment on..

(I don't need features like VMotion, DRS or DPM..)

Well, doing this off of memory, but I believe it's pretty much the same software, it just doesn't work with the products you were discussing.

Do you have a Dell server?
What do you consider "cheap"? Adaptec has a four port card for under 200, for example.

I'm just building a white box pc/server for a dev lab, have done a bit more research and there seems to be plenty of folks out there that use the Perc 5i / 6i which seem to sell 2nd hand for about 200, so I'm probably going to go with that, looks like the trickiest part will be finding a suitable motherboard with supported on board NIC and enough DIMM slots for 24gb ram.

thanks

Hi,

I've setup a Perc 5i card on my PC and created a RAID 0 Volume with two Raptor WD3000HLFS.

When i try to install ESXi 5 the installation hangs at Loading scheduler, if try 4.1 it gives a GP 13 Exception.

If i remove the raid volume, the installation doesn't freeze.

i've tried with these 3 firmwares:

DELL 5.1.1-0040
DELL 5.2.2-0072
LSI 7.0.1-0083

Anyone had this problem before?

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey