I'm planning to build a small virtual environment based on ESXi for experimentation and educating myself. The plan is to use the following HBA (build in support for RAID 0, 1, 10): SAS 9217-8i
The RAID will be build with:
1) Two 3TB HDD RAID 1
2) Two 500GB SSD RAID 0
My concern is that since the HBA does not have memory for caching and BBU the performance will be really slow.
Also the VMWare compatibility hardware site lists the HBA as SAS device. Are there any problems with ESXi and HBA RAID arrays.
Thanks
Stephan