I just recently installed ESXi on a SX280. This is a USFF(ultra small form factor) dell. It is running a p4 3.0ghz w/ 2gigs of ddr2, 250 western digital hard drive, 1000MT Intel NIC. Originally I had a problem with the CPUIDLimit but after looking at some google searching and reading(about 10 mins) I found some of the boot commands that got me through the install. After the install and reboot it brought me back to the same CPUIDLimit error. Rebooted and held the Shift + o (o as in oscar) and put the nocheckCPUIDLimit command and hit enter twice. This setting is also changed in the VI console under, Configuration.. Advanced Settings... click VMkernel... uncheck VMkernel.Boot.checkCPUIDLimit. Everything is working great. Installed a windows 2003 server with Oracle10g and it runs pretty good, better than workstation or server. The reason I wanted to test on this type of system is because 1. no one has done it on one of these little guys(at least I couldn't find any but im sure there has been) 2. I didn't want to completely start over on a Prod machine. 3. I have a few of these at home and I like testing stuff. Final thoughts for the SX280, Decent Test environment if you dont want to buy a top of the line system. Does not have VT, it isn't a dual core. Its a p4 3.0ghz HT, but its small and only consumes 70watts of elec. 90w under load. (measured with a kill-a-watt meter)

Going back to the Prod box. Its not a blade its not a rack server either its a Dell Poweredge 1900 w/ Dual Quad Core Zeon with 16gigs of ram. I skimped out on the raid card to save money. I know that its important but the one that I purchased performs and does what I need it to do. It's and SA1430 four lane sata2 PCI-E. The card is not on the supported list but like the sx280 I'm sure someone has tried some non supported cards. Any Drivers that I could use? Thanks for any comments or criticism