I bought an IBM M1115 6 Gbps SAS controller card from ebay and cross flashed it with the LSI 9211-8i firmware to use with VMware ESXi 5.
The cross flashing tutorial:
IBM ServeRAID M1015 Part 4: Cross flashing to a LSI9211-8i in IT or IR mode
Everything works fine in ESXi and I have a FreeNAS 9 guest directly using my HDD through Raw Device Mapping (RDM).
There are two ESXi configuration changes needed for the FreeNAS guest to work properly:
- Raw Device Mapping option is grayed out (1017704)
- Configuring promiscuous mode on a virtual switch or portgroup (1004099)
The first change allows selecting local drives via RDM and the latter is to access the plugin jail ip address (e.g. Tranmission).