Need motherboard and/or raid card for VMWare esxi 5/6

[Chuck Reid]

Hello,

I purchased an Asus Z9PE-D16 motherboard a year back or so when it was listed on the compatibility doc of VMWare for ESXi 4 or 5 at the time. I finally have the system built with a rocketraid 4320 from highpoint but when i load esxi 5.5 or 6.0 they do not find a local volume to install to. I have 4 disks in a raid 5 array that is initialized and is listed in BIOS as a boot device 4320.

Now, vmware tech support is telling me that Asus is not supported. In fact, when i look at the motherboard compatibilty tool, there are NO consumer server motherboard brands listed as being compatible. It only lists intel and acer and a few other commercial grade motherboards or servers.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.ph...

Am I doing something wrong? Is there no consumer motherboard that I can purchase for ESXi?

Is it perhaps just my highpoint rocket raid card that is the issue and maybe that needs to be replaced? Highpoint tech support said it didnt support ESXi even though the 4320 card was listed as supported in esxi 4.1 on the vmware website, but is not listed for esxi 5 or 6.

Im at a loss and have all of this expensive hardware just sitting here, very depressed with the whole thing.

Should i try to sell what i have on ebay and get something completely different?

Thanks....

 

[XavierMace]

ESX4 is REALLY old and VMWare dropped support for quite a bit of older hardware when they released 5. I'd toss a 32Gb USB flash drive on the board and boot VMWare off that. That will allow you to bypass the Highpoint card for the time being.

 

[davidthemaster3]

Sure the motherboard might not be supported, but I'm sure the issue is more with the RAID controller than the mobo itself.

 

[Chuck Reid]

Sure the motherboard might not be supported, but I'm sure the issue is more with the RAID controller than the mobo itself.

Ok, I removed the raidcard and plugged my hard drives (4) into the motherboard.
The motherboard has onboard RAID LSI Megaraid. I set up an array with the 4 disks in raid 0 and then i initialized the array.

When i start to install esxi 6.0 it now sees hard drives (yay) but i expected to see one virtual drive, not all 4 drives.. It lists each of the 4 drives as local ATA, i dont see a virtual volume at all.

Am I missing something?