Monitoring hardware RAID on VMWare ESXi

Of course ESXi has thorough and extensive hardware monitoring support (that article talks about one Adaptec-flavour of monitoring). I can tell you everything that's going on in every part of my fully supported hardware, if Adaptec make an ESX/ESXi driver for your adapter with hardware RAID support then it'll pass pre-failure and failure warnings up to ESX/ESXi which can then in turn forward them on either via vCenter or SNMP.

I am not sure about ESXi monitoring the raid but does your supermicro have a management card? those generaly have SNMP and you can easily monitor the Raid, fans etc.

going with fully supported hardware + SAN would be ideal in production environments if you need it.

Most of our Virtual stuff is on Dell R710 with Dell Equalogic PS6000e's for storage - the combo works great. plenty of monitoring and excellent performance/RoI etc.