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gopherhockey
Contributor
Contributor

Low Cost ESX 3.5 System - Suggestions?

For training purposes, I would like to put together a Vmware ESX 3.5 compatible computer to use in a lab environment. Something that can still run 3-4 systems, but also something that is not expensive.

To test with Windows 2008 Hyper-V it took about $550 on newegg.com and I have a solid lab box that can run 4-5 systems easily. Plenty to train on and practice.

With Vmware ESX its more confusing. First, the dual-CPU requirement seems to force me into server class motherboards. I think there are some motherboards meant for home systems that could pull it off. My guess is it will have to be Intel EM64T compatible (in order to run 64-bit hosts) as I'm having a hard time finding dual-CPU mothersboard that run AMD Athlon X2 type processors (something in the $140 range per processor)

I figure someone here has had probably done the same. I have an old Dell server that can run ESX, but its huge, slow, only has 3GB ram and while it has dual CPU its not 64-bit compatible.

Has anyone been able to put together a dual-CPU system for at or around $600?

So far it looks like the majority of my training will remain on Hyper-V. A nice product actually. Good thing they support Single CPU.

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116 Replies
JMills
Expert
Expert

I have a HP DC7700, but everytime i try to install ESX 3.5 U2 it says 'the installer was unable to find any supported network devices'.

The onboard NIC works fine in Windows.

Any suggestions greatly recieved!

Thanks

From what I have gathered elsewhere, the Intel 82566DM controller (on-board GigE for the HP dc7700) requires at minimum version 7.6.5 of the Linux e1000 driver to function properly.

The current revision which has been cross-ported for ESXi 3.5.0u2 is 7.3.15 ... ergo, it may quite truthfully be unsupported.

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mikekoz
Contributor
Contributor

FYI - I got the sata on a dc7800 SFF to work by moving the HD cable from SATA0 to SATA4, mind you I used a Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB drive in place of the stock HD. I'm guessing that port is on a different controller.

As for the NIC, I used an HP Broadcom PCI-E GigE (p/n: EA833AA) in place of the onboard unit.

Cheers,

Mike

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Hi Mike, was this ESX regular or ESXi that you were trying to install?

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mikekoz
Contributor
Contributor

I'm running ESXi or 3i v3.5.0 build-110271 to be exact.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Have we got any updates on a cheap solution, my wife will kill me if its to much - just paid put 800 on a car service so I'm pushing the line already - teach me to buy an STi but hey it burns the competition...he he

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Virtual_Jazz
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Guys,

Have we been able to find a low cost solution that cost between £250 -300?

I finally got it to install and work on old hardware (my own put together system). See details below.

ASRock K7VT2 Motherboad

AMD Athlon 64, 3000+ Processor Socket A

IGB Ram

Intel Pro 1000GT Desktop Nic

Samsung 160GB IDE drive

ATI Radeon 9550 VGA Adapter

PS2 Mouse and Keyboard

ADAptec AHA 2940u2W Ultra2 scsi

This system was built about 3years ago, so not quite sure if you can still get the same stuff out there, and if you did it would be a lot cheaper than I paid. All in all this system should come under £250.

Now I am in the market to get a cheap system to run Openfiler. I hear you can do wonders with it.

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danahallenbeck
Contributor
Contributor

Has anybody gotten ESXi to run on the dc7700 yet? I'm trying with no luck...

Thanks.

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rc51cgy
Contributor
Contributor

Hello, I am running ESXi (installable) on a dc7700CMT machine.

It's stock out of the box. What I did do was put in an Adaptec 1210 card in it for the install (not really sure if I needed it or not) but I had one laying around at he office and threw it in and did the install.

After I got it up and running, I decided to pull the 1210 card out and just run off the normal SATA controller and she boots and runs fine.

I can get you the specs of the machine in detail if you'd like. I'll have to shut her down and take a peek, haven't looked at the hardware of that machine in 6 months or so.

Cheers!

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freuds
Contributor
Contributor

I have successfully installed ESXi 3.5 in a Dell Vostro 200, a cheap entry-level desktop pc.

- Network:

The Intel 82562V-2 motherboard integrated network adapted uses the new e1000e driver, so it’s not supported by ESXi, I had to use a Intel 100S network pci card.

- Storage:

Intel 82801IR/IO/IH (ICH9 Family) 4 port SATA IDE Controller: Supported

Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) 2 Port SATA IDE Controller: Supported, but this box uses a sata cdrom, and the installation will fail using this drive, so you will need to install using a external usb cdrom, from a PXE server, o remove the HD and plug in a supported box and install from this box as I did.

ESXi will not recognize the cdrom.

After that , I’m currently using 3 VMs at this box.

Carlos

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KunalKPatel
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Erik,

We purchased the following components and attempted installation using the latest ESXi 3.5 Version 3.5 Update 3 | 123629 - 11/06/08

-Shuttle SX38P2 Pro,

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33Ghz,

Kingston HyperX DDR2 1066 RAM,

2 x WD 500GB Drives,

HP nc360t Dual Gigabit

nvidia GeForce 6200 128mb DDR PCIe Video Card

we've followed the same setup with IDE with Legacy and still receive the error "Unable to find supported device to write the VMware ESX 3.5.0 image to"

Would you be able to provide some insight?We would greatly appreciate it.

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Erik_Zandboer
Expert
Expert

Hi,

If you can install ESX, but not boot afterwards try this:

1) install ESX

2) on reboot of the host, choose "service console olny (troubleshooting mode)"

3) login as root

4) type "lspci" and locate any unknown IDE or SATA controllers. write down the device ID.

5) edit "/etc/vmware/pciid/sata_nv.xml". Go to the end of the file, and modify the last entry to match the device ID from step 4.

6) run "esxcfg-pciid"

7) reboot and be amazed!

Or are you unable to install at all? In that case I think your (propably SATA) CDROM/DVD will be the culprit. Try to attach an IDE CDROM drive to install from in that case.

Visit my blog at

Visit my blog at http://www.vmdamentals.com
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KunalKPatel
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Erik,

ESX wont install actually, So I'm using ESXi, I tried following the steps found at vm-help.com in terms of finding out the PCI IDs

I see there is the intel ICH9 IDE controller and I have 2 disks connected in IDE mode with legacy support. They are plugged into 2 of the 4 SATA ports that exist on that board

Pressing fdisk -l results in nothing,

I used lspci -v to list off all the devices and found that though it did list the ICH9 controler along with the Intel Gigabit NICs there was one device as follows

IDE Interface mass storage controller

class 0101: 197b:2368

this is a jmicron controller after doing some research and looking at the oem.tgz and simple.map its not listed there.

Do you have any experience working with this? With adding a device like this in?

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Erik_Zandboer
Expert
Expert

Hi,

Personally I have got no experience with these mainboards (or hardware on them). I would not suggest to set SATA devices to IDE emulation. Ok, you should be able to install ESX or ESXi to an IDE drive, but you cannot add VMFS storage on an IDE drive. So for a low budget solution it is not the way to go anyway.

I would try to set the SATA controller (in the BIOS) back to SATA non-raid, then try all the tricks again. If it keeps failing, you could consider to create a bootable USB stick with ESXi on it (check out ). Then ESXi will at least boot. After that you can start trying to format your SATA drive as VMFS and you are all set to go.

Visit my blog at

Visit my blog at http://www.vmdamentals.com
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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

You'll want to have the drives connected to the ICH9 controller ports. There's no support of jmicron controllers at this point. If you run lspci -p and the IDE module is loaded for the ICH9 controller, then you'll need to use this install method - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_install_to_IDE_drive/ESXi_install_to_IDE_drive.php. It'll allow you to install ESXi to an IDE drive as well as have a VMFS partition on it.

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KunalKPatel
Contributor
Contributor

Hey Dave, Thanks but I did try making the exact same edit listed on that link.

The issue is the specs shown on this system do indeed show ICH9 however the only SATA ports on the Motherboard (all 4 of them) I suppose are of the JMicron controller.

However I was wondering if you believe its possible to edit the oem.tgz file and entering in the PCI IDs of the JMicron controller (197b:2368) and I saw the ICH9 controller shows a PCI ID of (8086: 2926) with an associated driver of ata_piix

Do you suppose if i enter the JMicron id and also list it with the ata_piix it could launch?

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KunalKPatel
Contributor
Contributor

Ok i edited the oem.tgz file as well as the simple.map file entered in the JMicron pci id and well got a pink screen of death.

I took the community updated OEM.tgz file unzipped it on my mac, edited in the jmicron pci id in accordance to all the other IDs were structured, (197b:2368 0000:0000 ata_piix)

i then used GUI tar (mac program) to zip back into a oem.tgz file

copied onto the flash drive, it gets so far as the yellow install screen a quarter way and boom..pink screen of death.

My initial thought was that it was the storage driver i selected to be associated with the JMicron PCI ID however even after eliminating my edits, and zipping back into a tgz file the pink screen occurs again.

So this tells me being simply able to open up the oem file, edit the simple.map and pci.ids file and then re-zipping into .tgz will create an image that will crash.

Any help on how to edit this OEM.tgz file and then properly copying into my flash drive which works otherwise when using the non-altered vmware version or the community oem.tgz file?

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Are you using SATA drives or IDE? I look at the specs for the MB and the IDE connection is owned by the jmicron controller so that you won't be able to use with ESXi. You might try switching the settings for SATA / Legacy options in the BIOS.

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KunalKPatel
Contributor
Contributor

Hey Dave,

Im using 2 WD 500GB SATA drives - i have the BIOS set to IDE mode with legacy.

I am trying to install from a USB flash drive - not boot from one.

But what I wanted to do is update that oem.tgz file however extracting it, editing and then re-compressing into a tgz file seems to create an installation that always crashes with a pink screen.

using a straight copy of the community edited oem.tgz onto the flash drive it does at least load but will not install. It cannot find a device to install to. obviously because the jmicron is not supported and not listed in the simple.map and pci.ids file.

I also did perform the steps found here

in order to install onto an IDE disk however that doesn't help.

Can you explain how to edit the community oem.tgz file and properly recompress it to then be copied onto my usb flash drive installer? This should allow me to try out the edits to the oem file at least.

Thanks for any help you or anyone else may be able to offer.

-Kunal

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

You can follow the customizing oem.tgz steps on vm-help.com. Do you have a Linux system to do this on?

I would suggest perhaps extracting the DD image to the USB drive and then booting from it. That way you can edit the oem.tgz file within ESX itself.

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Also do you see anything with fdisk -l and have you tried different SATA ports? On some MBs where there are 4 or more SATA ports it seems that only specific ones work Ok with ESXi.

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