I have a desktop I rebuilt as a Hyper-V server a while ago, and I just did some upgrades to it and want to rebuild it with ESXi. The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5, which has the NVIDIA® nForce 590-SLI chipset for SATA RAID. I configured 3 1TB drives in a RAID-5 array, but when I boot from the ESXi 4.1 U1 installer disc, it shows me the 3 individual drives instead of my logical drive. When I boot with the Hyper-V 2008 R2 Server installer disc, it sees my logical drive, so I know the RAID setup is right. I noticed the VMWare HCL says "IDE RAID and SATA RAID are not supported for the VMFS file system", but is this any SATA RAID or just certain ones? I read on a third-party site that some of these onboard RAID controllers actually use software RAID, so I was wondering if I were to purchase a standalone RAID controller if I would still have the same problem. I am looking at either the Rosewill RC-217 or the HighPoint RocketRAID 2300, but I want to get someone to confirm that the RAID controller I order will actually let me use RAID-5 for my ESXi setup.
Anyone have experience with ESXi on SATA RAID?