I have a very strange mashup of parts that I am trying to get working for a project. Due to a windfall from a client who was getting rid of hardware, I became the proud owner of a HP P822 controller.
I also happen to have an older Supermicro X8DAH motherboard in a case with 10 hotswapable sata drives that is running EXSI 6.5. Currently it is booting to ESXI via a memory stick and using an old Dell 6/IR controller card for a RAID 1 storage pool. I wanted to know if there is a way that I can utilize the HP P822 card in this system without the use of iLO because obviously the Supermicro board does not have it. Then I would want to make a RAID 6 array and a larger storage pool for data storage.
I have SaS to sata breakout cables running internally, and I know that I will lose some functionality because I am not using HP drives and obviously the sata drives are not going to be very fast. I am familiar with setting up Raid but I am not sure if I can run this setup without iLO to configure the array/update firmware/monitor drives. I have read some stuff about an HP Smart Start CD that I would boot to prior to booting into the OS, but I have yet to find a current version. Is what I am looking to do possible?
Also what can I do about monitoring the array? is there a manager I can use from within a windows VM or another machine? can I update firmware? can I get into the HP p822 via a keypress on startup? (there are no visual commands, but I can see the card boot)
If it helps when ESXI boots up I can see the HP controller is available, obviously there is no storage pool associated with it because I have not configured one.