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I recently purchased 2 HP Proliant DL380 G6 servers for the purpose of virtulization; each will be a new host in our VMware environment. I know that I will get heat for this, but I do not want to use any RAID. We have our own method of redundancy, so I am not looking for a lecture on why I need RAID. I just need to know if it is possible for the servers to see each disk individually.

The units shipped with the HP Smart Array P410i/Zero Memory Controller and I am assuming this is what is causing the new SAS drives to have poor performance.

So is this possible to disable in the BIOS? Or will I need to purchase an HP Smart Array that has memory?

ewwhite
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Schoney1
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1 Answers1

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No.

This is not possible.

The HP ProLiant DL380 G6 isn't a new server, though. It's three generations removed. If you're trying to use this for vSAN, don't. If it's any other situation where you need access to the RAW disk devices, you should purchase a dedicated SAS HBA from LSI or an HP-branded LSI controller. This can then be connected to the backplane and is compatible with VMware.

Same rules for ZFS, Hadoop, Storage Spaces, vSAN, etc.

I'm really curious about what you're doing, though.

If spinning disk performance is an issue, you really do need a Flash-backed Write Cache module and RAM for the RAID controller. Can you explain your problem in more detail?

Community
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ewwhite
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