I have bought a new server where I use the motherboard
ASUS P9X79 WS X79 S-2011 ATX. It will be used for virtualization, preferably using VMware vSphere Hypervisor™ (ESXi) if I can get the RAID on my motherboard working with VMWare (it does not detect it).
The motherboard has the Intel® X79 chipset, which for RAID controller means vendor ID 8086 (Intel) and model ID 2826.
When I boot the ESXi 5.0.0 installation media from my flash drive I can not see drives in the RAID5 set I created.
Questions:
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Is there a VIB file for the RAID controller I can use?
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I have found one article at http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/CS-033313.htm on getting RAID to work with some Intel controllers, it lists 9 integrated RAID modules it is comptabile with. However, there is no mention of the X79 chipset.
Best Answer
The RAID on that motherboard is not real hardware RAID, it's "fakeraid" that depends on drivers in the operating system. ESXi doesn't support fakeraid, because it's aimed at enterprise environments (which use real hardware RAID for better performance), not consumer PCs (which use fakeraid because it's cheap). ESXi should recognize drives connected to that controller, but only as standalone drives, not as a RAID array.
You might want to opt for a different virtualization platform, such as Citrix XenServer or Linux KVM. If you really want to use ESXi, you could set up your three drives as separate datastores, give each of your VMs three virtual disks — one from each datastore — and set up software RAID within each VM's operating system.
(The VMs will not be able to see the host's fakeraid controller. Isolating guests from the host's hardware is half the point of virtualization. Guests will only see their virtual disks.)
There are unofficial drivers that you can install on ESXi to support additional hardware, including a "dmraid" one for Intel Matrix RAID (your chipset's fakeraid), but you're going out on a limb if you do that.