Hello all,

I know there have been a few discussion about this combination before (ESXi on HP DL160), but i feel it is worth a new discussion since U3.

We have installed ESXi 3.5 U3 on a DL160 and it works GREAT. we did not have to do anything at all.

Simply enabled the virtualization support in the BIOS, and set the HDD mode to AHCI after enabling optimized defaults and installed ESXi with no problems at all.

NB: The HP specific build of ESXi does NOT work, you need the generic version of ESXi 3.5 U3.

Regarding peoples complaints about disk throughput, we installed a virtual machine and ran a disk throughput utility and managed to get a sustained read and write of just under 100MBps!!!

So, my question is this; why oh why do VMWare not want to add the driver for the HP embedded RAID controller?

I am very aware that this is a software based controller, but it is one of the best embedded software controllers on the market and performs really very, very well.

It is such a huge disappointment that we cannot enable RAID. If we could enable RAID we would look at purchasing Virtual Center and happily build a mini Virtual Data Center with a bunch of DL160's as they work so well, but adding the cost of an SA E200 to each one just makes the overall cost too much for a small business like ours.

Thanks in advance.