Sorted my problem.

It's something that I've encountered before. The motherboard in my system is an ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA, with an nForce3 chipset. I did have a couple of Seagate SATA drives in there. I have now swapped them for two Western Digital WD2500AAKS 250GB drives - and the performance has gone up markedly.

With the Seagate drives, I was getting around 2Mbs and 8Mbs copying data to them over a Gig-e network. With the WD drives, I'm now getting around 17Mbs!! A vast improvement. I managed to copy over 60Gb of VMs in a few hours, no problem. And that was via the VI client, which previously ran like a stunned snail!

So I can confirm, the following spec appears to work perfectly fine with ESXi 3.5.0:

ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA motherboard

AMD Athlon 64 4000+

4GB Crucial RAM

2x Western Digital WD2500AAKS 250GB SATA hard drives

Liteon DVDRW IDE drive

GeForce 4MX AGP graphics card

Intel Pro1000MT NIC

3Com 3c905TX-CMX 100Mbs NIC

We're not using the onboard NIC as I disabled it some time ago for other reasons, and just went with the cards already in the box.

Now I just need a little iSCSI box, and I'm laughing. FreeNAS here I come!!!

I had a motherboard with inbuilt Sata Silicon image 3114 4 port and it worked on that too, however I only attached 1 drive.

I'd say that if the card is supported then all of the ports will function.

Agreed. I'm a windows man but openfiler kicks butt

Only thing I wished you could do was create iscsi volumes as files as opposed to out of real partitions.

Mr Gimper: Sure you mean ML115 G5 - I think you mean G1 (G5s are ML110).

What dual NICs have you bought that works like a charm? I think I will invest in a few too - just want to make sure it works out-of-the-box.

Strange. They're still called ML115 G1 on the webshops here in Sweden. Where do you get them for £115 (if open for anyone) - that's insanely cheap

Edit: It seems like there was some G1 models which are a little bit different from G5 models.

There are some differences like the G5 has:

• Slot 1: PCI 32-bit/33MHz PCI at 3.3V

• Slot 2: PCI-Express x1 connector with x1 link

• Slot 3: PCI-Express x8 connector with x8 link

• Slot 4: PCI-Express x16 connector with x16 link

The G1 has:

•   Two 32-bit/33MHz PCI at 3.3V slot

• Two PCI-Express slots (x8 and x16)

...and also some different CPUs available.

Formatter,

I have a SiI3114 SATA 4 port card.  If I configure 3 drives as RAID 5 it does not recognise the partition yet if I remove 1 drive and then reload software it will boot.  Bit spooky any thoughts?

Regards

John

Please consider the environment, only print out this email if absolutely necessary.

Alginon

I think it may be due to the support for the two sata connector card but it doesnt say that the 4 sata connector card will work.

Hello guys, I have been reading all your posts about trying to get esx 3.5 working on various whiteboxes. I just thought I would add my system and what I have encounter in trying to get it working.

My system is as follows:

Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe

AMD Phenom™ X4 9500 quad-core processor

8GB RAM

1 x 80GB Sata (Main install point for ESX)

1 x 150GB sata

2 x 500GB sata mirrored using 3ware 9650se card.

I was able to do the install, including booting from my 3ware cd to start the install and load the drivers for my card, I then followed the instructions earlier in this thread using the script provided and running inside of ubuntu linux live to fix the sata controller issue and the "could not mount root" error. However, what I am encountering now is that I can get into ESX no problem, configure it, etc, but the next time I reboot I am back to square one with the cannot mount root issue and stuck at the sh prompt.

Just wondering, any ideas why it does this. I think it has something to do with when I reboot and it says it is "saving vmware server configuration", I am betting it is modifying something back to an original state and is causing the error all over again.

tks

Jeremy