Hi folks

those of you who are trying / using Esxi then it;s possible to pass thru (or attach) physical RAW disks to your VM's - so you can attach existing Windows (NTFS) or Linux formatted disks and also RAID configured arrays as RAW disks.

For software RAID attach the disks individually and then when the guest starts the VM should recognize the array in the normal way. Same with Windows storage spaces (although I'm not a big fan of those).

This link represents how to do it easily

How to passthrough SATA drives directly on VMWare ESXI 6.5 as RDMs . GitHub

If you DO try Esxi note you can run the OS easily from a USB stick -- it's a TINY OS and once the OS is booted you can remove the USB stick as the Esxi is memory resident (tiny OS so hardly any memory or resources used).

Note though the RAW disks can't be part of "the data store" though -- for testing I tried a USB for the Esxi OS and a data store on an external USB SSD --SSD attached to computer via USB-->SATA connector.

You should be able to get near native speeds from your VM's == well worth an experiment with if you have a bit of time -- do the ESXi install to a USB stick so you don't need to touch existing Windows etc installations.

Sound also works BTW on VM's !!!

Cheers
jimbo