Hi,
I am looking to start studing vSphere 5 and wanted to upgrade my home machine to support a ESXi vSphere 5.1 installation.
My current machine is a ASUS P9x79 DELUXE motherboard with 32GB of RAM (http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_2011/P9X79_DELUXE/), and 2 x OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS SATA III 2.5 (http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-vertex-3-max-iops-sata-iii-2-5-ssd.html)
I know the onboard X79 wont work as a RAID solution, and of the 2 NIC's on the motherboard only the Intel is detected.
I am therefore on the lookout for an internal SATA RAID controller and 4 port NIC.
Can anyone please suggest any half decent cards that will work with my current MB, HDD's, and supported by vSphere 5.1 on the HCL?
I've seen there are some RAID controllers available from LSI and Intel but am unsure which one's to get, because I'm not sure of the connection support for ny two internal SSD SATA drives.
I have the following slots free on the MB:
PCIe 3.0 x16_2 slot (single at x16, dual at x16/x16, triple at x16/x8/x8 mode)
PCIe 3.0 x16_3 slot
PCIe 3.0 x16_4 slot
PCIe 2.0 x1_2 slot
Many thanks!