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In my last questions I didn't make myself clear, so I will do my best to explain it.

I have a server with esxi 5 installed on it. I am not able to setup hardware raid atm, and need a workaround.

From previous question I have been told to setup a raid for guest-os (don't confuse with hardware/software raid for/on host). I wasn't able to find any information about this, nor found any option in guest-os bios.

Help appreciated.

Edit: I have two drives setup as datastores. Each drive/datastore will host one image file for guest os

jM2.me
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You can use a Raw Device Mapping to pass the raw disks through to the guest that you want to do this on and use that guest's software RAID. This seems like a bad solution, though. Why on Earth can't you get a hardware RAID controller for your ESXi server?

MDMarra
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  • Not worth it in my opinion since I just need to keep a copy of data. And this will be used for one guest only. Other guests are running off SSD. – jM2.me Mar 24 '12 at 20:51
  • If I had two or more VMs that would require data backups, then I would invest into hardware raid. – jM2.me Mar 24 '12 at 20:52
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    RAID is not a backup. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? It sounds like you have a very strange configuration. – MDMarra Mar 24 '12 at 21:10
  • I have a dual socket with 6 cores each. Most hosted VMs aren't storage depended and thus they run from SSD drives. For one VM I need to setup two drives in raid1 (mirror), but buying hardware raid for this would be a waste. Anyway I ended up doing RDM for two drives and creating raid1 setup inside guest-os. Exactly what I need. – jM2.me Mar 24 '12 at 21:32