So has anyone been able to install VMWare ESX or ESXi on an HP X4000 machine?
It is an HP X4000, 3GB RDRAM, Dual Channel U160 Integrated Controller, 2 SCSI Drives, but all of this can be found here:
Supposedly, is an LSI SYM53C1010R integrated U160 controller in the x4000.
So has anyone been able to install ESX or ESXi onto an X4000 system? Or any way I can make this work?
P.S.
I noticed that it freezes during:
Configuring VMkernel, specifically on "Loading module ehci-hcd..."
So possibly not the SCSI controller?
Have you tried disabling any unnecessary devices (USB / etc). Does the system have an onboard SATA controller and if so can you change the mode of it to ide or sata?
At the install screen you can press ALT-F1 the login with root (blank password) to get a console session. Run lspic to get the the PCI ids for the device. You can use the -v switch to get more info on the devices. I have a list here of the PCI ids that Update 2 will recognize and thus try to load a device driver for - www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/Hardware_support.php. If your device isn't listed, then it is possible to modify the install files assuming the adapter can use the LSI driver.
You can install ESXi on an IDE drive, but you can't create a datastore on it (i.e. you would have to use an NFS / iSCSI server on your network to store VM files.
03:08:00 Mass Storage Controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53C1010 66MHz Ultra3 SCSI Adapter
Class 0100:1000:0021
Take a look at this thread - http://communities.vmware.com/click.jspa?searchID=-1&objectType=2&objectID=1006219. Basically he got ESXi to run on a USB flash drive and then tried to edit oem.tgz to recognize the device that was not listed is simple.map.
The problem is that the device ID is not in simple.map - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/Hardware_support.php. I haven't tried to modify simple.map on a CD itself, but I have done with with a PXE server
You could get around this by adding a storage controller that has been tested - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3.5/Whiteboxes_SATA_Controllers_for_ESX_3.5_3i.htm#SATA. These have mostly been tested with ESX but if you look at that list and the simple.map list you should get an idea for an alternative.
I will do this and "break" this sucker so others do not have to buy new equipment...
Look at this thread - http://communities.vmware.com/click.jspa?searchID=-1&objectType=2&objectID=1006219. This would help if you're using a USB flash drive or PXE to install. For the install ISO, there's oem.tgz in the root of the CD which is used for the install only. The other one is buried in install.tgz. That might be a bit harder to switch.
But if you could get the CD to boot and see the drive, then install the image that the server is going to run with, you could then boot the server after the install with a Linux live type CD and fix oem.tgz on the hard drive.
I'm glad you got something running. If you were to want to use the LSI controller, you would do something like this -
1) cd /tmp/
2) mkdir -p oem/etc/vmware
3) mkdir -p oem/usr/share/hwdata
4) cd oem/etc/vmware
5) cp /etc/vmware/simple.map simple.map
6) vi simple.map
--- add the necessary PCI data for your devices
7) close vi - press ESC and enter :wq
😎 cd /tmp/oem/usr/share/hwdata
9) cp /usr/share/hwdata/pci.ids pci.ids
10) vi pci.ids
-- add the necessary description for your devices (this will be displayed in the console and VI Client
11) close vi - press ESC and enter :wq
12) cd /tmp/oem
13) chown -R 201:201 ./etc
14) chown -R 201:201 ./usr
15) chmod -R 755 ./etc
16) chmod -R 755 ./usr
17) chmod 644 ./etc/vmware/simple.map
18) chmod 644 ./usr/share/hwdata/pci.ids
19) tar -cvzf oem.tgz etc usr
20) cp oem.tgz /bootbank/oem.tgz
21) cd /bootbank/
22) cdmod 755 oem.tgz
23) reboot the host
I'm using an HP ML110 with the
53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI controller which is on the supported hardware list referenced here yet ESXi can't find a target to install to. Is there anything I can do to get this working? Thank you for your time!
Hi,
I have an ASUS with the 53C1010 on board, so I decided to charge ahead and add 1000:0021 1000:1010 to simple map with the mptscsi_2xx . Not sure what you would have come up with, but for me :
ALERT: Mod: 1413 Initialization for mptscsi_2xx failed with -19.
mptscsi_2xx failed to load with status 0, -19, 0xbad0001
Personally, I think I'm out of options until I get another SCSI adapter.
Tuc