I recently put together a budget ESXi 6 server for home and I wanted a cheap hardware RAID card for it.

I purchased myself this card – a SilverStone SST-ECS03. It cost about £40, which is a lot cheaper than any of the cards on the ESXi 6 HCL!

I installed the card and disks, then formatted a new RAID1 array with no issues. But of course… ESXi 6 didn’t recognise the card. It transpires this is because VMware removed support for any devices not on the HCL. However… this support can be added back in!

1/ Enable SSH

2/ SSH into the box and type the following –

esxcli software acceptance set –level=CommunitySupported
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
esxcli software vib install -d http://vibsdepot.v-front.de -n sata-xahci

3/ Reboot the ESXi host

4/ Marvell at the hardware RAID card now being available! 🙂

Sources –

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/silverstone-pci-express-card-2x-sata-6-gbps-ports-supports-raid-0-raid-1-span-and-non-raid-function
http://www.thomasmaurer.ch/2015/04/enable-ssh-on-vmware-esxi-6-0
https://communities.vmware.com/thread/505243