Hi,
I’m in the middle of finally building my first “server” with an asrock rack x570d4u, Ryzen 9 5900x and 2 nvme SSDs. I’m having quite a bit of trouble getting the 2 SSDs configured as a RAID 1 though. Due to the choice of Hypervisor (ESXi) I want to use, I cannot use a software RAID, so I’m trying to use AMDs RAID utility. Within the BIOS I can select the disks and create an Array (see screenshots) , but when I boot into ESXi, the array is nowhere to be seen and only the 2 drives show up. I saw that there is a AMD RAID utility for Windows, do I need that to properly create the virtual disk? and if so, do you only need it to create it once or do you need to have the drivers running all the time? Any experience or nods into the right direction are very appreciated. Thanks!
PS: With this only being my 2nd post, please tell me if this belongs somewhere else or if tech support is not welcome here…
The Windows driver is necessary because the Windows kernel simply forbids dynamic disks and partitions to co-exist, so every hardware manufacturer needs to invent their own software RAID implementation for Windows.
ESXi hates software RAID or anything not validated with a vengeance.
You’ll need a type-2 hypervisor hosted on an OS that can use software RAID. Proxmox is one. Any old Linux distro with libvirtd is another way.
Too bad but I guess that makes sense. Then I’ll just have to get a 2nd node faster & build a VSAN instead. Proxmox would also be an option (probably the more sane one as well) but I’m mainly building this system as a lab to prepare for the VCP. Thanks very much for the help!