General Question on HP ML115

[michelb]

If I may ask a "general question"

I have read (a lot of) posts on the Nvidia SATA RAID controller issues this box has with ESXi. My question is,

Does the driver used by VM Server1/2 work with this HP box? (I haven't found any posts relating to the ML115 and VM Server)

If it does, could it be placed in ESXi's driver list and would it work to allow a setup where ESXi is installed to Drive "x" with the guest OS installed to a RAID 1 drive "y"&"z"

i.e. three harddrives with one stand-alone and the remaining two drives in a RAID 1 array.

I am aware of the USB trick but I am trying to get around using that method.

Anybody tried anything similar?

Regards,

[Dave_Mishchenko]

The drivers for ESX(i) have to be compiled specifically for ESX(i) and while some drivers are based on Linux source you can't use native Linux drivers. Also be aware that ESX(i) doesn't support software RAID controllers so with an nVidia MCP or Intel ICH controller the best you'll get with ESXi is it seeing individual drives.

[michelb]

Hi Dave,

Yes I know that (unfortunately) there is no "real" support for software raid, the question I was putting on the table is whether drivers for one flavour of VMware products could be adapted for another.

I suppose I was thinking along the lines of the MS WDM driver scenario.

I had no problems installing and running ESXi from Drive1 and creating a datastore on Drive2 (having used the "install-to-IDE" trick), the issue is only that force-failing Drive2 leaves a result that no datastore is found on Drive3 (obviously because of RAID failure)

Maybe worthwhile to put something like this on the wishlist.