MadDave noted: "You may need to actually enable the nic in one of the menus you get when you boot the server".

Hi MadDave. Do you mean in the Precision T3400 workstation BIOS? .. or in a menu within the ESXi installer?

The ethernet nic is physically enabled; booting any other operating system finds and uses it once a correct driver is installed. In the ESXi installer, I did not see any time where network interface controllers could be set up; the ESXi installation sees and claims to have enabled the integrated Broadcom NIC (ifconfig -a finds that controller, indicates it has the static IP address I gave it during the configuration of ESXi, and says it is "UP", but it can't communicate with anything else on the LAN).

Thanks
Jay

Hm. When I purchased my machine, it also contained the E4600 CPU (WithOUT virtualization support). The ESXi installed CD (3.5.0 update *1*) noticed that fact and refused to run, so I bought the Q6600 CPU to replace the E4600 which had come in the machine. I think that may be more likely what's getting in your way that the BIOS version.

Thanks for the note about the BIOS update - I last checked about one week ago, so maybe A07 came out since then. I'll look again. I'm actually on holiday at Oshkosh EAA AirVenture this week, so it'll be a few days...

Cheers,
Jay

Follow-up: The "Cat 5E" Ethernet cable I'm using on this system has a rubberized guard to protect the anchor tab ... which prevents the anchor tab from anchoring. When the ESXi server was telling me that it had no Link on the built-in Broadcom Ethernet adapter (which the installation had found and configured), it was right...
I had just updated the BIOS in this system to A07 at the same time as I realized this stupid Ethernet cable problem, so I can't say whether the A05 vs A07 BIOS version makes any difference.

So, here's my status:

• ESXi 3.5.0 update 2 installed on Dell Precision T3400 BIOS A07 Q6600 CPU 4GB ECC DDR2 800 RAM, using a SATA-attached single non-RAID non-AHCI disk
• Built-in Ethernet adapter (only Ethernet adapter in the system) configured and working
• Web interface working
• VMWare Infrastructure Client working to configure and remotely access VMs

And here's where I've realized that all of this is not useful to what I really want to accomplish, which is to use one monstrously powerful workstation as:

• At the base, a truly Virtual Machine platform
• On top of the VM base, my Domain controller (Server 2003 or 2008)
• Also on top of the VM base, my main workstation, including things like Home Theatre functionality (I use SnapStream's Beyond TV product), dual video outputs (one for the primary display, and the other for video watching), with the VM base permitting this workstation (or even yet a third virtual machine) to have direct access to PCI / PCIx boards for hardware tuning and encoding of broadcast/ cable/ satellite video streams.

What I realize is that none of the virtualization environments can do two of the key things above:
1. Use the actual physical console of the machine as a high end graphic (video) workstation
2. Give a hosted virtual machine direct hardware access to e.g. hardware tuner / encoder boards and display full video to a secondary display

But it was fun while it lasted. And evidently, as long as you're satisfied either with no RAID, or having to plug in a supported RAID controller to get RAID, the Precision T3400 series will run ESXi 3.5.0 update 2.

Jay