Highpoint RocketRaid 620 in ESXi?

[Zarathustra[H]]

Has anyone used one of these little cards under ESXi?

Are they recognized in 5.1?

I have one of these kicking around (I think I got it free with a WD 3TB drive), and I want to install it to use for the two SSD's in my system (32GB boot drive and 128GB datastore), so that I can pass through the on board SATA controller to my FreeNAS guest.

I wouldn't be trying anything fancy, just running it in plain old JBOD mode.

The two SSD's are currently plugged into the on board controller.

Presuming this card actually is recognized under ESXi, how receptive does ESXi tend to be to switching stuff like this on existing installs?

If I power down, plug it in, disconnect the boot drive and datastore drive from onboard and connect them to this card, should it boot, or will I have more issues to deal with?

Much appreciated,
Matt

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Looks like I found the answer myself.

The RocketRaid 620 card uses the Marvell 88SE9128 chip which according to this link is neither supported out of the box, nor has a whitebox driver for ESXi.


With that in mind. Can anyone recommend a decent cheap pcie controller that WILL work just for a boot drive and small data store?

Thanks,
Matt

 

[Wing]

Take a look at ZFS if you want. The other option i went for (before i knew what ZFS was) is a DELL perc 6/i card.. dosnt have jbod though.. but slightly more expensive than that rocketraid 620 card (was my first choice as well)

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Thank you for those thoughts.

I do plan on using ZFS to build a RAIDz2 volume with FreeNAS as a guest under ESXi 5.

In this thread, I moved on from my existing low cost controllers and actually ordered an IBM M1015 server SAS/SATA controller.

While it is a RAID controller, I plan on flashing it with IT firmware, and running it as a JBOD controller, and letting ZFS do all my raid.