Hi.
I am building a whitebox system intended to run ESXI 5.1, hosting some application/web servers.
I have purchased an IBM M1015, as it seems to be pretty popular for "home-use" ESXI's.
I intend to run RAID1 using SATA drives, in order to at least have some sort of redundancy.
Now my questions is: how do I monitor, or at least manually check, if a disk in my RAID array breaks? I've read that if I run hardware raid (and ESXI does not want to know about software RAID), SMART data is not available.
I can live without "early warnings" from SMART, but I need to know if I lose a disk.
Is there some way to do that using a single system, or should I "host" the data stores on some external system/NAS which can keep an eye on my drives?