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
Hello,
In RAID 1 with the SST-ECS03 raid controller, ESXi detects 1 or 2 disks for a datastore? Because I currently have 2 disks in RAID 1 software with intel rapid storage technology but the raid 1 is not detected, ESXi shows me 2 hard disks …
The AHCI mode is functional with this card but the RAID mode works he too? I can not find the information on the internet.
Thank you.
Will it be possible to install the ESXi system on that raid and boot off it? Can the drivers be loaded during system install or is there another trick (such as install on non-raid, copy system to raid, chroot and install GRUB, just like one would have done with a ‘real’ linux)?
Thanks
/klaus