I'm building an virtual environment for a small business. It is based around a single ESXi 5.1 host, which will host half a dozen or so VMs. I'm having some doubts regarding how to implement the storage though. I naturally want the datastore to be fault tolerant, but I can't get the funds for a separate storage machine, nor expensive hardware RAID solutions, so I would like to use some software RAID (lvm/mdadm, most likely). How can this be implemented? My only idea so far would be to create a VM which has the storage adapter as passthrough, puts some software RAID on top of the disks and then presents the resulting volumes "back" to the ESXi host which then creates a datastore from which other VMs get their storage presented.
This does seem kind of round-about, do I have any better options? From my research, passthrough seems to come with quite a few drawbacks, such as no suspend/resume etc.
Best Answer
ESXi is not a general-purpose OS and shouldn't be considered so - stick absolutely to the Hardware Compatibility List and therefore use a tested and approved hardware RAID adapter. Choose to do anything else and you'll join the swathes of others who cut corners and end up back here complaining that their systems don't work or they've lost data - we get LOTS of those.