RAID Card recomendation

[BlackStarX3]

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.

 

[tekgeek1205]

Get a LSI 92xx 8i from ebay. Just don't bid on the one i'm trying for!

 

 

[BlueCrazii]

Dont use raid cards use hba(host bus adapter) card raid cards dont give full information if you wanna use it in lets say a nas with freenas

[leadeater]

LSI 9260/9266/9270 with the BBU for write-back cache otherwise RAID5/6 performance will be rather bad.

 

2 hours ago, BlueCrazii said:

Dont use raid cards use hba(host bus adapter) card raid cards dont give full information if you wanna use it in lets say a nas with freenas

Depends but if the use case is for a direct local ESXi datastore a RAID card is required. If a FreeNAS VM with passthrough is going to be used then an HBA is required. For ESXi a RAID card is much cleaner than a passthrough VM then presenting storage back to the host, I do it (not with FreeNAS) but it's the not cleanest way to do it and you have to be careful to not create a circular dependency because if you do you are screwed if you shutdown the VM. 

[Jarsky]

5 hours ago, BlueCrazii said:

Dont use raid cards use hba(host bus adapter) card raid cards dont give full information if you wanna use it in lets say a nas with freenas

For VM testlabs, he'd get much better performance out of a hardware RAID setup. I'm currently pushing about 1300MB/s across 12 spindles, which gives an excessive amount of performance for dumping VM's on when I need too. With 6 HItachi's I imagine he should be able to hit about 800MB/s+ with decent access times using hardware RAID with write-back. When virtualizing with VMware its a much more simple setup for the VMFS datastores to have local hardware RAID5 storage as well, rather than having to install FreeNAS to a seperate device, pass-through the disks to FreeNAS, then configure a LUN(s) back to the host. 

[BlackStarX3]

16 hours ago, leadeater said:

LSI 9260/9266/9270 with the BBU for write-back cache otherwise RAID5/6 performance will be rather bad.

 

Depends but if the use case is for a direct local ESXi datastore a RAID card is required. If a FreeNAS VM with passthrough is going to be used then an HBA is required. For ESXi a RAID card is much cleaner than a passthrough VM then presenting storage back to the host, I do it (not with FreeNAS) but it's the not cleanest way to do it and you have to be careful to not create a circular dependency because if you do you are screwed if you shutdown the VM. 

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.

[Jarsky]

Depends on your budget. The LSI 9271 is even better but it will cost about ~USD$100 more. Don't forget to include the cost of the BBU in your budget as well for the cache protection which enables write-back