SAS RAID controllers: P812 or ?

I have an HP P812 1GB (with super cap IIRC) controller I could use in a whitebox ESXi host, but after spending a frustrating amount of time this weekend troubleshooting other HP stuff, I'm wondering if there are better options.

I'm looking for RAID5 or RAID6 for an array of 5 x 600GB SAS2 drives, as well as a few individual drives (both SSD and HDD). EDIT: This is for a small ESXi host that I run 3-4 VMs on.

All thing considered (performance, compatibility with random non-HP/Dell/etc. consumer drives, easily/cheaply replaceable battery backup modules, etc.) is the P812 good to stick with, or should I look at a Perc H700, H800, or ??

I'm tempted to go 'non-vendor specific' with something like LSI, but I also want to keep costs low as I suffer badly from the old 'champagne tastes on a beer budget' syndrome, and going LSI/Adaptec/whatever appears to be at least 2X the price.