With Adaptec 2405 Raid Card & Intel NIC + 4 Seagate ES.2 Disks in Raid 10 configuration.


1. Health Status in the ESXi Console does not show any hardware apart from the processor.

2. IOMMU can be enabled in the BIOS and looks like it might work but I have not tested.

3. The Raid setup cannot be monitored. I was particularly disappointed with this card as I made sure that this card was supported on ESXi. It is but they don’t tell you that the card and therefor the raid array cannot be monitored. Maybe a supported MB might have fixed this problem.

4. ESX 4.0 would install without any difficulty but 4.1 would stop partway through the install and complain that it could not find a CD-ROM drive. The fix was to install 4.0 and then upgrade to 4.1

If I was to do it again. I would buy a slower X6 processor - This one is overkill & I would buy a different Raid card.

Hope this helps someone...

Thanks for posting your specs. Unfortunately a CIM provider has never been developed for Adaptec controllers so you don't get health status for any of their cards. Not sure why Adaptec / VMware have ever gotten around to that.