If, however, you install the server with VMWare ESXi the guest operating systems do not have direct access to the hardware and so using ServerView RAID manager after a default install will not correctly display the RAID subsystem. This was seen as a big negative for using Vmware ESXi 4 as ServerView RAID manager can be very critical when troubleshooting, planning or fixing anything to do with RAID.
After trying to find a way around this situation I stumbled across a brief mention of a way to connect to the CIM API that is provided by VMWare. This allows developers to create software that can talk to the hardware of the server via a CIM broker. ServerView RAID can take advantage of this and a VMWare server can be added via the amCLI command, as shown below (Updated: This works on Windows and Linux):
amCLI -e 21/0 add_server name=1.1.1.1 port=5989 username=root password=*****
Change the server name to an IP address or DNS name of your server, the username and password to the one matching your VMWare installation.
Confirm the addition by running
amCLI -e 21/0 show_server_list
Delete the server by running, changing the name as appropriate
amCLI -e 21/0 delete_server name=1.1.1.1
Log into the ServerView RAID web interface as normal (https://IP Address:3173) using the superuser name and password for the OS. You should now see the RAID adapter from the VMWare ESXi 4 server. This has been tested on a TX150 S6 and TX200 S5 with a LSI1078 RAID card.
If the adapter does not appear then make sure there is a host file entry for the IP address of the guest OS that is running ServerView RAID
