Does VMWare ESXi 4.1 work with SATA hard drives

satavmware-esxivmware-vsphere

I'm confused about the hard drive requirements to use VMWare ESXi 4.1

I conducted an experiment on an old desktop PC with a SATA hard drive and it couldn't find it.

I'm now ready to go to production but I'm unsure whether a SATA hard drive will be ok. If not should I use a SSD.

Note: I'm not using RAID

Best Answer

This is going to depend mostly on your motherboard/SATA controller's support under VMWare. It's less about SATA and more about how the drives are presented to the OS. VMWare prefers server-class hardware, as only a certain number of storage drivers can be included in the small ESXi image.

You can take a look at this user-compiled "whitebox" hardware compatibility list for VMWare to get a feeling as to whether your setup will work.

Also see: VMWare ESX installation on sata disk

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