I have a Dell Power edge 2950 with a raid 6 array.  Currently running 3 vm's on VMware vsphere esxi. one of which is my firewall.

Yesterday I have a drive fail in the array and the orange light on the drive status indicator was blinking.  I would assume that because the array is still intact the VM's would keep on going like nothing happened.  But it appears that when the drive failed, it took out my internet because the firewall wen't offline.  I could ping the esxi host and connect to esxi with the client software but it was empty. not showing any vm's or info beyond the esxi host.
Is this normal or should the vm's have not been interrupted?    I inspected the dell settings to see if it was doing some automated task that would kill the array if a drive wen't bad but couldn't find anything that would do this.  Any ideas?

Rebooting server restored the virtual machines.

I've seen this when RAID controllers are starting to go out.

Whats odd is if i simply pull a drive while it's running, nothing happens. VM's keep running like it should.

After inserting a replacement drive and letting it rebuild.  I put the bad drive back in.  It successfully rebuilt itself and worked for a few hours before it was detected as a bad drive again. and once again took down my vm's.  

This makes no logical sense and I would have to go with a bad RAID controller also.

Isn't the 2950 a 10 year old machine? Which controller does it have in it?

I think they were released in 2006, so yeah.  I believe it was the Perc 5/i but I don't know for sure.

It's running a perc6i.  I do have another perc6 laying around. I'll swap and rebuild the bad drive and see what happens.  It seems to me if the card was bad itnwould be doing more then this.

I have used pfsense mostly but am trying out untangle at the moment.