ESXi 4 on an ASUS P5N-D issues pre/post install

[Garaxiel]

HEllo fellow community.

I'm having som odd issues Pre and Post install on an Asus P5N-D Motherboard and ESXi 4U1

Basic specs:

Inter E5300 Dual Core chips, 4GB RAM and 4x 500GB Drives (running on the onboard SATA In a RAID 5 Configuration giving 1.36TB Space)

Anyhow, on the baord the BIOS shows that teh Hard Drive is a RAID 5 1.36TB Harddrive and the RAID report on boot shows it as a healthy array. However when i boot off the ESXi 4 Disc for install, at the point of choosing the installation path, i see all 4 of the drives for the RAID Array indivisually and not as a singular Drive.

Has anyone else ran into this? did i miss a command at the beginning i should have put in manually?

Also. To try and further troubleshoot, i then used a 1GB USB Key and installed ESXi on that. Works fine and boots the machine, but when i go into the VSphere client, under the summary tab for my ESXi box, i am seeing Datastore2 and Datastore1 listed and being of sizes 465.50 and 461.50 respectively. It's not showing all 4 disk, but even worse yet, it is not showing them as a singular drive in an Array.

Has anyone else experienced this with this motherboard or something similar?

any information needed or help would be greatly appreciated.

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

ESXi does not support this type of embedded RAID controller (often called fakeraid). The best you will get is individual disks. You can check the Hardware Compatibility List for a supported hardware raid controller.

[Garaxiel]

Aw crud. I saw that the board was supported on the HCL and (i guess wrongly) assumed that the RAID was also supported since the board was. Well i guess i'm buying a fancy RAID Controller earlier then planned. Thanks

[DSTAVERT]

LSI or the Dell controllers (which are LSI) have good support as well as supporting hardware monitoring in the vSphere client. Can be found quite reasonable on ebay and the like.