Using onboard SATA ports and M1015 ports for unraid in ESXi 5.1 possible?

My collegue and I are building an unraid server in ESXi using components he got cheap(ish). He wants to use an Asrock E3C226D2, E3-1230V3, M1015 and 8 GB Kingston ECC DDR3.

The MB has only one PCI-E slot, so he can only use one M1015.

His ESXi datastore is on a disk attached to a SATA port on the MB.

Can the other SATA ports also somehow be used for unraid through RDM? Or are there other ways? Or can the datastore be moved to perhaps USB?

You can RDM drives to VMs.  I did that for a WHSv1 VM I had on ESXi.  Another option is a SAS Expander like the Intel RES2SV240 or any other brand expander for that matter.  It allows me to get 24 drives off a single M1015 card.  You do pay a speed penalty of about 25% when using an expander but that is acceptable to me.

Thanks.

In what way does RDM differ from through passthru? Is RDM purely a software solution?

Thanks.

 

In what way does RDM differ from through passthru? Is RDM purely a software solution?

There are two modes of RDM available one is reported to allow more capabilities but I've never used it.  The version I used did not allow spin down and getting temperatures from the drives in unRAID.  I believe that the other mode allows one or the other to work maybe both but I could be wrong.  It has also been a while since I used it so my memory may be faulty.  I used the instructions in the Atlas thread for RDM and unless it has been updated it documents the option I used but other posts later list the other mode possible.

In any case that is why I suggested the SAS expander because that connects to the M1015 and allows up to 24 drive off the M1015 in the case of the RES2SV240 expander.  24 is the current unRAID limit.