This a RocketRAID 222x from Highpoint Technologies. Your link is telling me that this will not work. Hard to believe there's no solution. Thank you.
Main Topics
Browse All TopicsI have a Windows 2003 SP2 Standard where a SATA RAID card is installed and working. On this machine I installed VMware server. On VMware server I installed Windows 2003 Standard. The SATA RAID card is not seen on the Windows 2003 virtual system. I tried installing the drivers of the card for W2K3 on the host, but it shows the device with a exclamation in device manager. What should I do to have this card installed properly?
Thank you.
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.

Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
http://communities.vmware.
It might pay to let us know what you are trying to achieve?
Reboot the server- physical VMWare server. During the DOS boot process there should show the initialization of the RAID adapter and to press CTRL+H to configure
From there you can configure the type of RAID array you want RAID 0,1,5 or 10
Otherwise from within the Windows VMWare server you should be able to install the drivers and web-based raid configuration utility. Configure the RAID array as required.
Once you have configured the RAID array you can then creat a disk under: computer management -> disk management
Let us know how you go.
vanderwee. Thanks for the comment. The SATA RAID card is installed on a Dell server and a SATA unit (external) is connected to this card. On this SATA unit there are 4 SATA drives configured on a RAID 5. This is working in the current OS (W2k3 Enterprise) and it shows as F: drive letter. What I need is to be able to have this same configuration under the virtual W2k3 system which means be able to see this same drive as the F: drive. Basically for this I only need to have this virtual OS detect the SATA card (correct?) and then the manufacturer's software takes care of managing it.
I think the thing you need to understand is that, in vmware, everything is virtual. vmware doesn't (with few exceptions) have direct access to the cards in your physical server. Even the hard drives are not really hard drives, they're files on the host server's disks. In vmware the pci cards are all going to say "vmware virtual network adapter" "vmware virtual video card", etc... (not exact wording, but you get the point) - they're all virtual, you don't load drivers for your physical video card, hard drive card, etc... in to vmware, you load vmware's virtual drivers - all the hardware specific stuff ONLY gets done at the host level.
If you need to have an F drive on your virtual machine what you do is configure a second drive in vmware server, but that drive is not going to be physical, it is going to be a file on the host, and that file can be located anywhere you want. That said, you can (as others have said earlier), enable direct access to a drive from the guest, but then the host can no access the drive. And even in this situation, the guest still sees the "vmware virtual hard drive controller", all of the actual configuration (drivers, raid setup, etc) happen on the host.
Hope that helps to clarify. Its just a matter of wrapping your brain around everything being virtual!
Just to add one more comment - the huge benefit for everything being virtual is that you can have a billion host servers, all with different physical hardware, and you can move that guest from one host to another (even from windows to linux) with out any changes because to the guest everything stays the same (still have the same virtual video card, virtual hard drive controller, etc...).
Hi,
You can't leverage the SATA RAID controller in your virtual machine. Even if you did, you won't be able to maximise or use it in the sense you wish to. VMware Server can allow you to use a virtual disk and you ca specify either a BusLogic or LSI Visrtual Hard Disk. You will be required to download the appropriate driver for that, but i am sorry to say that you can't access the host machines SATA RAID Controller directly from the Virtual machine.
If you are trying to leverage to the SATA RAID Redundacy, you can ddirectly use the hard disks on the controller, rather than creating a virtual hard disk. It's a fairly easy way to do it, but reommede d for high/tech users.
Thanks
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: nathana21Posted on 2007-10-16 at 08:11:07ID: 20086233
see this list >
index.php? content=sa ta_faq
http://vmprofessional.com/