Thank you for your response.

I noticed that you posted a lot of information about this subject throughout the various VMTN forums, and I tried to read and implement as much as possible ; but unfortunately it is not working yet. I am getting purple screens even though I believe I followed each step provided by these detailed explanations. Any idea what might be causing that ? I made sure I used a bin/hex text editor to modify the PCI files, and I carefully respected the tree structure while updating the OEM files. But I probably missed something, or there might be something else interferring, but I cannot figure out what.

Also, are you suggesting that the ICH8 is not really a RAID controller, but simply a chipset designed to "present" the drives to the OS (as "JBOD"), which itself needs a dedicated driver to perform software based-RAID (thus impacting performance and compatibility) ?

Given the important and growing community of users who own a system with a disk controller based on the ICH8 chipset (or all SATA in general), and who would like to run even a non supported version of ESX in that kind of environment (if VMware has no plans to support anything other than SCSI and SAS), are you aware of any company that might take up the challenge and provide a module for ESX that would offer just that, or even of an easy to use, freeware patch or bootable ISO to fill that increasing need ?

Thank you.

Actually... I did just that and, even though it took me a while to get the flash drive to boot (since I don't have any Linux box to prepare the boot loader), I managed to get it to boot just like the CD would (through a freeware, third-party tool). If I boot the flash drive with the original VMware files (ESXi 3.5 ISO installer), then everthing loads until I get a warning that there is no storage ; but no crash. Whereas if I boot the flash drive with the 4 modified files (specifically oem.tgz containing the modified pci.ids and simple.map, as well as the modified VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd also containing the modified pci.ids and simple.map), then I systematically get a purple screen right after the installer has completed the "yellow screen" progress session.

I was able to run the same Flash drive against a different type of hardware, just to see how it would react, and I had the same crash, but at least I have a static purple screen which allows me to read what the problem is. It states the following : "Cannot set up ramdisk : Boot image is corrupted" and also "Tar header is invalid for etc/" (as you can probably tell, I am not a Linux expert). Any idea...?

This concept of software-based RAID is interesting (thanks for the link), but frustratingly reminds me of the Windows soft-modems... But I am sure there are varying forms of software RAID out there. So, as a general observation (since I am guessing you probably are not an Intel expert), with the ICHx chispet specifically : is the CPU handling most of the processing load ? Or instead, is the processor only being made aware of the existence of a RAID LUN, but then offloads the processing back to the chipset (thus retaining excellent performance) ?

Provided I at least got ESX to recognize the drive controller (RAID mode in particular), would these customizations (http://www.murty.net/ataraid/ and http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dmraid/), which are meant to get the OS to use and manage the RAID LUNs be applicable to ESX, since they are primarily meant for Linux ? Or would it be too incompatible to implement on ESX ?

I cannot wait until VMware releases its new major version of ESX and ESXi. Although not confirmed, my intuition was telling me they could not just close their eyes on SATA when the whole entire hardware industry (as well as VMware's own competitors in the OS virtualization realm) makes significant moves in that direction.

Also, if I can get my system (or any system) to boot ESXi via a Flash drive, then are you suggesting it is possible to have it run just like that ; as is (even though it might not recognize the built-in drive controller initially), as long as it can manage a different form of storage (such as iSCSI, NFS or ideally SAN through FC) ?

Thank you.

I was finally able to get my system to boot the modified ESXi 3.5 CD and install on a drive managed by the non-supported, internal ICH8/9 SATA controller.

My next question relates to networking. The installer does not detect the built-in NIC. The NIC on the system is an Intel 82566DM-2 Gigabit LAN controller.

Is the same procedure required to add support to the NIC (by modifying the oem.tgz file on the CD), or is it more complex ? How can this be implemented ?