[Xamayon]

ESXi needs the RAID to be handled by another device, the simplest case is a hardware RAID card with disks locally attached to it. You can also attach remote disks/volumes from other systems, with or without RAID, over the network/SAN/etc using an HBA, special network card, or the software iscsi initiator stuff in ESXi. You can even have something like a windows server act as the iscsi volume host, and attach to it over the normal network if you don't really care about reliability. The ESXi OS will not appreciate it if you ever turn the remote volume host system off, or if the network drops out. It's really too bad the free and cheap ESXi licenses are going away, it was always so nice to work with...

[mannyv]

That's right, Broadcom bought them and the party's open. Download your ESXi while you can!