BlackStarX3

Thank you so much... I guess that's the best answer so far. As you, I've thought about the cleanest way possible too. So I'll go for direct disk for the ESXi. I'm heading to buy a LSI 9260 just some more opinions and I'll be done.

Hello, Well I'm quite a starter speaking about virtualization. Still, I'm aiming high and I need to set up a workstation computer for having several virtualized environments. This is what I have: Asus Motherboard Z10PE-d16 WS 4 x 2TB Hitachi drives (planning on getting 2 more) And, I want to install VMware ESXI 6.5. The motherboard does support RAID but its software RAID, and that isn't going to work with ESXi. So I need a pretty good RAID card or a HBA one that can handle RAID configurations (RAID 1 for now at least), but I don't know what exactly should I get. I got from Linus's videos that a LSI 9260-8i may do it great. Still, I don't know if that's too overkill since I'm only planning to handle 6 x 2TB drives in the near feature. I do not discard the idea of getting an LSI 9260-8i, but maybe I won't need that full power for now and I want a price/technology/performance advice.

Having said that, would you recommend buying from those folks that bring them from china in ebay? or is there a better option?