I have an Asuse P8P67 motherboard with onboard intel RAID controller, I'v configured a RAID 0 in "intel rapid storage - option rom" but ESXi installation wizard shows the physical disks only not RIAD volume. and RAID is not working after installation.
How can I use Intel ICH10R raid controller in VMware ESXi?
There is compatibility going beyond VMWare's HCL - a "whitebox HCL" has been assembled by the community listing a lot of components which ESX(i) has been found to work with. It also has something to say about software RAID controllers:
this list includes a number of SATA controllers that provide RAID functionily via a software component in the drivers supplied with the controller. Examples would be the Intel ICH series and the nVidia MCP series. ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x do not support that software RAID functionality thus you will only be able to access the individual drives connected to controllers such as these.
ESXi tends to only support tier-1 RAID controllers (like LSI/PERC/etc.), but you may have some luck finding it here.
Another (and in my opinion, better option) is to setup an iSCSI capable NAS like OpenFiler, FreeNAS, or NexentaStor (which uses ZFS; all kinds of awesome right there).
In short, because intel is lying to you. It isn't an actual controller, it's a piece of embeded software using your computer as the controller. (CPU/MEMORY etc.)
