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Building a RAID array for ESXi
godmode
Southeast JapanRegistered User regular
Southeast JapanRegistered User regular
Looking for any VMware pros that might be able to help:
I built a server at home. It's basic: 5 disks, a Xeon processor, and a bunch of RAM. Originally I intended to install FreeNAS on it, but then I discovered that I hate FreeNAS, especially its FreeBSD virtual suite BHyve. It's flaming trash and I won't be convinced otherwise. Instead I'd like to install ESXi, let's say version 6.5. I'll probably end up buying the 1-socket Essentials license at some point when I have a few hundred bucks laying around.
Installing the software is easy enough - I'm just putting the OS on a thumb drive. How do I create a RAID array for the underlying disks though? One nice feature of FreeNAS is that it lets you create a ZFS pool in the very beginning of your installation and it's all done through the interface, and I'm wondering how to accomplish the same thing on VMware. I'm comfortable enough with PowerCLI if it has to be done that way - I don't necessarily need a GUI solution. I'd like to create a RAID5 pool (Yes, I know everyone recommends RAID10 for virtuals), and make that pool one big VMware datastore. Creating a VMware Datastore is easy enough, but I'd like to make sure it's got 1 redundant disk and it wasn't clear if that's the case. I've been searching around on Google a bit but I haven't been finding any straightforward answers for what I'm trying to do on a single host. Is what I'm trying to do even possible?
I built a server at home. It's basic: 5 disks, a Xeon processor, and a bunch of RAM. Originally I intended to install FreeNAS on it, but then I discovered that I hate FreeNAS, especially its FreeBSD virtual suite BHyve. It's flaming trash and I won't be convinced otherwise. Instead I'd like to install ESXi, let's say version 6.5. I'll probably end up buying the 1-socket Essentials license at some point when I have a few hundred bucks laying around.
Installing the software is easy enough - I'm just putting the OS on a thumb drive. How do I create a RAID array for the underlying disks though? One nice feature of FreeNAS is that it lets you create a ZFS pool in the very beginning of your installation and it's all done through the interface, and I'm wondering how to accomplish the same thing on VMware. I'm comfortable enough with PowerCLI if it has to be done that way - I don't necessarily need a GUI solution. I'd like to create a RAID5 pool (Yes, I know everyone recommends RAID10 for virtuals), and make that pool one big VMware datastore. Creating a VMware Datastore is easy enough, but I'd like to make sure it's got 1 redundant disk and it wasn't clear if that's the case. I've been searching around on Google a bit but I haven't been finding any straightforward answers for what I'm trying to do on a single host. Is what I'm trying to do even possible?
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If you're expecting ESXi to let you pool non-RAID disks into some kind of software RAID volume... it doesn't do that.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If you know what kind of RAID controller you have then I (or somebody else here) could give you more details.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I guess I was spoiled by FreeNAS' ZFS option, so I didn't even really think to check for that functionality at the hardware level. Thanks for the tip!
Consider there is one other way you can shoehorn redundancy into a VMware environment. It's a bit kludgey but you can make it work.
In ESXi, set up each physical disk as a separate datastore. Then when you roll out a VM, put one virtual disk in one datastore and a second virtual disk in the second datastore.
Then configure software RAID inside the VM's operating system.
I wouldn't do this in a production environment but for a test lab it's probably fine.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.