Reply1.Re: ESXi on Poweredge 860? Aug 6, 2008 9:37 AM
Hello Ebbe, welcome to the VMware Community forums. The PE 830 and 840 have been tested - http://www.vm-help.com/Whitebox_HCL.php - you should be OK with the 860. What model of perc controller does it have?
Just as an FYI: i have NOT been able to get ESX3i to install on a PowerEdge 860 without a raid card (meaning using onboad SATA drives). My machine has 2x160GB SATA drives hooked up directly to the onboard ports. ESX 3i v3.5.0 U3, will not install on this device, it says:
Unable to find a supported device to write the VMware ESX 3i 3.5.0 image to.
Good Luck.
Reply7.Re: ESXi on Poweredge 860? Dec 2, 2008 4:46 PM
in response to: __Tango
You wont have any issue installing on the PE860. I have one running with no problems, but I am using the SAS on board raid controller. Not sure if you can even use those Sata ports that are on board, I never tried them. (and I have a lot of 860's!).
Reply8.Re: ESXi on Poweredge 860? Dec 2, 2008 5:47 PM
in response to: s1xth
That was my point. Installs using the PERC or SAS card seem to work. Without a PERC or SAS card (using onboard sata) doesn't work. The onboard SATA works fine in other OSes, just not in ESXi.
Reply11.Re: ESXi on Poweredge 860? Mar 3, 2009 7:03 AM
in response to: agomezp
We were having the same problem as you initially mentioned. Our Poweredge 860 has two SATA drives but no PERC or SAS raid controller cards installed.
Trying to install ESX3.5i in that scenario always failed, no matter what settings we changed in the BIOS or even after upgrading it to revision A05.
We finally found a workaround to install ESXi3.5 in this scenario: http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_install_to_IDE_drive/ESXi_install_to_IDE_drive.html
Basically you fool the ESX3.5i installer to make it think is being installed to an IDE drive.
This worked at the first shot for us but we are not sure whether there will be any performace implications using this method or not. Any idea?
Thanks!
Reply12.Re: ESXi on Poweredge 860? Mar 3, 2009 4:02 PM
in response to: tunasalad
If it's the ICH7 controller that you have then you could modify oem.tgz to load the ata_piix driver instead of the ide driver - see the customizing oem.tgz article on vm-help.com. If you are concerned with performance then the best bet would be a good RAID controller with battery backed write cache.
