x99 ws-e uefi raid not boot

Well sheeiit.

Looks as though ESXi has dropped software RAID beginning with the 5.5 release. I didn't know that until just now in looking.

Time to get out your 9341-4i and begin anew.

Keep me posted on your progress or lack thereof while doing this please.

Your board, most boards, only provide software RAID as it doesn't have a dedicated hardware based RAID controller/chip installed on the motherboard itself. Look at the X99 Extreme11. It has the onboard hardware RAID controller, an LSI SAS3008. On your board the RAID processor is essentially your CPU, as it does the actual grunt work vs a dedicated hardware based RAID controller.

I do and do not understand ESXi dropping software RAID support.

In support of them dropping it. Our hardware is getting ever more powerful so thus "supporting" the less ideal software RAID is a harm to their product in that there are many posts blaming ESXi itself whereas the blame lays elsewhere.

On the other hand, with only now supporting hardware based controllers they have a tighter control on limiting the above bad experiences and in turn EXSi as a product is all the better for doing so.

The card you have, the 9341-xi is referred to as an entry level RAID controller. It doesn't have the cache, and/so thus no battery backup is needed. I don't know what you do to need RAID5 but some, most/all, would consider the inclusion of onboard cache and its intended battery backup a must have.

Video editing? RAID5 is all about read speed yet with single disk write performance.

Yea. Dedicated cards do get hot. That is the reult of the processing they do that is hardware based. Calculating Partity bits etc .....

I suggested originally you use the motherboard as the array would gain maneuverability from board to board. And too i considered and also based my suggestion on the fact that your 9341 doesn't have any cache.

Swapping arrays between alike motherboards is relatively pain-free. Swapping arrays between dislike dedicated cards is a no go and everything would need rebuilding and too require that you made regular backups with which to restore back to with.

The 9240 isn't much different from the 9341 you already(?) have. Both will use the X99's CPU. ie: sotfware RAID

Now I'm really confused. It appears, no matter what thee newsgroups and forums I poured thru earlier stated, that the 9341 is in fact supported in ESXi 6.0. I decided to trudge thru the VMWare Compatibility Guide myself toning after reading of that 9240 you just posted of.

9341-4I Compatibility and correct drivers to use:
http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=io&productid=35201&vcl=true

9240-xi Compatibility and correct drivers to use:
(Note: It appears there is two cards w/differing HWIDs)
(-4- or -8i makes no diff as same processor)
http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/vcl/result.php?search=lsi+megaraid+9240&searchCategory=all

I'm wondering what OS twisterice is using, and what version of the IRST driver was being used?

I haven't checked into this at all as you have wardog, but I wonder if any of the latest changes Intel has done to accommodate the new types of SSDs in the IRST software is at least one factor in ESXi not working with Intel's RAID implementation. Intel uses the SNIA standard for RAID, or at least they have in the past.

My point is another, earlier version of the IRST driver, or if twisterice's board supports the Intel RSTe RAID software (Intel's Enterprise RAID driver version, used originally with the X79 chipset, but not an option for PC X99 boards) might be compatible. Pure guess on my part.

IMO, the big snobbery about "fake RAID" or "software RAID" is easy to talk about, but let's see if we can afford the real thing, hardware RAID. Oh wait, just a dedicated processor and software for all the IO? That's nice... how does the hardware RAID processor compare to a good Intel CPU and PCH chip (equivalent of the Southbridge chip of the near-past)?

IO on PC boards is so separate from the CPU, that the CPU usage is so low and causes the cores to go into their power saving states. Alas, the memory controller is part of the CPU, so as AHCI and RAID software try to read IO commands from system memory, they wait for a core to wake up, which causes IO latency.

That is one reason why "hardware RAID" exists. Meanwhile, the hardware RAID processor is always fully on, using power, and dissipating heat. Good RAID cards cost more than an entire PC. Their performance is usually biased for one type of IO at the expense of other types.

In the end, we are comparing apples and oranges. The balance and flexibility of a PC, vs a dedicated IO engine.