Thread moved to ESXi forum.

What happens when the BMC on the PE 2800 throws an event like "it's getting hot in here" or the DRAC reports "shutdown host operating system" or the PERC reports "another one ( UltraSCSI 15K drive ) bites the dust"? Normally the CPU would be booted into RHEL or W2K3 and DELL's software on those operating systems would detect the event and possibly shutdown the system in an orderly manner (or at least write to a log file somewhere). (Also, I'm assuming the DRAC does its remote-media trick at the firmware level and does not involve the host operating system, which is a big assumption.) So the question is, how is that handled under ESX 3i on a "supported" DELL server? Is all the critical stuff just standard ACPI or is it some kind of DELL proprietary interrupt? ESX 3u must have such built-in support for the DELL machines that it officially supports and so one can wonder if that DELL support would also work with the BMC on the PE 2800, or if it would merely treat these great machines like another white box and force us to rely on the DRAC for all monitoring (rather than OpenManage) and deal with the BMC/DRAC hard-crashing the operating system during catastrophic failures. So the original poster's question about whether or not this is a case where DELL just didn't test (and so can't "officially" support) or if it's some kind of incompatibility is really important.

Also, I noticed that the PE 2800's BIOS doesn't allow the Intel VT extensions to be enabled (so no mixed 64/32 bit support under say VMware Server for W2K3 v1.0.5). Is ESX 3i capable of disregarding the BIOS and enabling this (if supported by the processors) itself?

Lastly, the PE2800 uses UltraSCSI (probably the last model to do so) with an optional external SAS rack. It also has an on-board ATA (IDE) controller that can run drives that cost a tiny fraction of what DELL charges and it supports external USB2 drives (if the host operating system can handle it). Does ESX support booting from the battery-backed-up PERC4 UltraSCSI controller in RAID1 mode as well as non-bootable ATA/IDE drives (CD and HD) and non-bootable external USB2 mass-storage (even with a reformat)? Seems like it would, but just checking to see if anyone has actually done it.

Yes, that's the only option.

You do have the option to copy the ISOs to the datastore of the ESXi host. It'll be faster than using the client drive option.

No, this would need to be set in the BIOS.

The Windows bluescreen was in the VBox on your Ubuntu 'puter or did it happen on the PE 2800 after the upload completed? If it was on the Ubuntu side, would recommend trying (what else) VMware Server for Ubuntu instead of VBox.

Maybe you could reformat the USB drive to be in FAT32 (like a giant thumbdrive) and see if ESX 3i will support it!

Thanks for reporting your experiments!!

It's not supported, but you can enable SSH access to ESXi and then copy the ISOs directly - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_enable_SSH.php.

They haven't fixed it. I have a system updated to the latest (the time bomb patch) and it was Ok for SSH before and after.