Looking a t LSi Megaraid 8708EM2 for SSD raid....yay or nay?

Angry

Limp Gawd
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Probably not an issue in home use but SSDs without power loss protection and RAID card without BBU is asking for trouble, even if server UPS should catch most power-loss situations.
Card is 3Gb only, SAS2, so you are limiting your drives. Cheap and ESXi supported, according to HCL, however
It should work but won't be ideal and since you invest in SSDs why slow them down and lock-in into an ancient RAID card. If thinking RAID5 it will perform poorly. Far better to go with a SAS HBA (3008, 3108 or even 3208 based) and vt-d passthrough to napp-it VM for zfs usage.
 
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Probably not an issue in home use but SSDs without power loss protection and RAID card without BBU is asking for trouble, even if server UPS should catch most power-loss situations.
Card is 3Gb only, SAS2, so you are limiting your drives. Cheap and ESXi supported, according to HCL, however
It should work but won't be ideal and since you invest in SSDs why slow them down and lock-in into an ancient RAID card. If thinking RAID5 it will perform poorly. Far better to go with a SAS HBA (3008, 3108 or even 3208 based) and vt-d passthrough to napp-it VM for zfs usage.

Ah, gotcha, Im really just wanting faster storage for my VM's. two of which are dedicated game servers, and another Plex. (media stored in a windows network share)
Right now im stuck on 4 250gb SATA drives, non raided.

Never messed with zfs outside of the few times Ive played with Freenas...
So are you saying its possible to use a zfs storage pool in Napp-it (had to google that one) with a SAS HBA in I.T. mode passed though?
And use it for VM's?
Ive only used drives attached directly to onboard SATA in the past, and the current drives are forced to "Enchanded IDE", due to some weird compatibilly issues with the onboard sata in AHCI mode and ESXi.

Also I do have my Frankenstein ESXi on a UPS of its own.
 
Looksie here http://www.napp-it.org/doc/downloads/napp-in-one.pdf
Using it myself and gea, the author and developer, has a long thread on these forums as well as elsewhere.
ESX boots off whatever (raid1, SATA DOM, USB, whetever you use). napp-it VM has the HBA in exclusive use through vt-d and provisions your drives, including ESX data store for other VMs.
I love the setup myself and plan on a second RAIDZ pool with 4 enterprise SSD (used) and secondary napp-it ESX for replication of data. It really is great and easy to setup I find. I too use it for multiple VMs in 24/7 operation . IMHO far better than RAID cards where you can't easily move them between controllers and your drives are effectively locked to the card, if your ESX with zfs dies, just use the drives elsewhere with your config backup, up and running in one hour :)
 
Going to be playing with this later today with Napp-it and ESXi.
I already have a LSI card flashed to IT mode.

I backed up my VM's (the important ones) and moved my four WD 250gb drives over to the LSI card, along with 2 of the 120gb Crucial m4 SSD's from my main rig. (I had four in Raid0) .

Should be fun...will come back with my results once I reload Win8.1 on to my main rig.
 
So....I really didnt figur out napp-it. I ended up getting lost in it. for whatever reason.

foudn this guide:

https://b3n.org/freenas-9-3-on-vmware-esxi-6-0-guide/

Made it as far as adding the NFS to ESXi,

And....

ifqYDvS.jpg


....Where is the option to add Network File system??

I feel like Im mising something simple...
 
Reinstalled ESXi 6.5 a couple of different times on different drives, never got the option for adding NFS, downgraded to ESXi 6.0 and voila, there it is.

Why I have no idea, I assumed ESXi 6.0 and 6.5 had the same features...
 
Get a perc h310.

I use one with 4x15000 rpm drives and have over 700 read and write in raid 0

It's my Steam drive connected via 10gbps InfiniBand
 
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16473386_1344436995577962_5506926479555184014_n.jpg


On the left is a bench of the two 120gb SSDs in my main rig, on the right is a benhcmark from inside a VM, with the same brand 120gb SSD's (Cruical m4).

The writes are a little wacky, but so far the VM's themselves havent cared.
I am at the limit of 24gb of ram for my ESXi rig though, time to upgrade.
 
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