If you have really a H730 in our R230  than create a Diskgroup of all of your DISKs and when creating the VirtualDisk(VD) just enter 20GB instead of 100% of capacity.  After that you can create a additional VD with the rest of all capacity. This ends in a setup with 2 LUNs and when install your ESXi just pick up the small one and when ESXi is up and running you have to create a Datastore on the large LUN. So ESXi and your Data is protected by the RAID5 and you will get the speeds of all of your spindels.When ever you need to reinstall ESXi your VM Data is protected because the both LUNs are separated. If you try to install ESXi 7.0 increase the the size of the Boot LUN from 20GB up to 140 because ESXi installer would like to create 128GB OS_DATA Partition.   Another way... you can install ESXi on a USB stick. Some poweredge servers have a internal USB slot otherwise you can plugin the stick from the outside. But iam not a Fan of USB. Regards,Joerg  
Hi all,I have R230 and currently my OS (ESXi) is installed on 3.5'' HDD, which occupies one hot swap slot. My plan is to move OS to either sd, ssd or 2.5'' hdd (instead of optical drive), so I could use all 4 hot swap slots for raid configuration (currently have 2 HDD in raid with perc H730).There is an info about IDSDM in R230 manual but I cannot find module that says that is compatible with R230. So my first question is can I use IDSDM with R230 for OS and if so which one?If IDSDM isn't an option or if you think that ssd is a better option, my second approach to this would be to install ssd with ssd to pcie adapter.Would this work on R230 ?And the last approach (that I can think of) is to install 2.5'' hdd instead of optical drive. Found one tutorial that this can be done on R330 ([URL] but didn't found any information about R230.So my third question is, can I replace optical drive with hdd on R230 ?
R230 internal storage