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Migrating Baremetal to ESXi - Passthrough HDDs or Controller?

Migrating Baremetal to ESXi - Passthrough HDDs or Controller?

I'm contemplating migrating moving my baremetal install on an HP Gen8 Microserver to ESXi (ESXi because I use it at work and am more familiar with it than Proxmox).   It seems pretty simple: just replace the xpenology USB boot stick I'm currently using with an ESXi boot stick, create a VM for DSM with a virtual boot image, pass through the existing disks and boot it up. DSM will do the "I've detected disks from another server, do you want to migrate?" thing, and I'm done, right?  
Okay, got the cache card and battery over the weekend! installed the cache and battery moved the SATA cable for the internal drive cage over to the P222 connected a 1x4 SATA tail to the onboard B120i adapter and put the existing 60GB SSD on port 1 (which is 6Gb/s, as opposed to the 3Gb/s port it was on before) booted up I was pleasantly surprised that the P222 was immediately enabled (some reports online that it needs to be powered up for an hour or so for the