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libove
Contributor
Contributor

Dell Precision T3400, ESXi, something else, or forget virtualization?

Hi,

I just purchased a Dell Precision T3400 workstation, and upgraded its default Core 2 Duo E4600 (no hardware virtualization support) CPU to a Core 2 Quad Q6600 to have plenty of CPU power and Intel's hardware virtualization support. I have this crazy idea of running a real virtual platform on the hardware, supporting a workstation image, a server image, and maybe even a home theatre / media center image. This hardware certainly has more power than my existing three such machines combined!

But... ESXi 3.5.0 gives the error "Unable to find a supported device to write the VMware ESX Server 3i 3.5.0 image to".

The Dell Precision has Intel's X38 Express chipset and ICH9R controller. I have tried booting the ESXi install CD with the machine configured both with the ICH9R in AHCI mode and with the ICH9R in RAID mode - same "Unable to find a supported device" error.

Has anyone got ESXi working on a Dell Precision withOUT the SaS RAID controller option, with just native SATA or AHCI or RAID from the integrated ICH9R controller?

Thanks

Jay

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GR2008
Contributor
Contributor

I was able to find a solution to getting VMWare ESXi version 4.0 installed on a Dell Precision T3400 system & support 64 Bit Virtual Machines. I did not have any problems installing ESXi on the system once I changed the SATA settings to be RAID with ATA functionality if there are not any active RAID drives. I did have problems trying to set up 64 bit VM's on this system though. After reading articles, I determined that it was my processor series that I had installed on my T3400 system. When we purchased the T3400, we selected a low end processor for this system. We had the Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 series processor. You would want to compare your processor with what Intel shows as having the virtualization functionality built into it. The Intel article can be located at for Core 2 Duo processors. Core 2 Quad processors can be located at .

I replaced the processor with an Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 series process running at 1.86 GHz. The 6300 series does have the Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) functionality. Once I installed the 6300 series processor, I looked in the BIOS. In the Performance tab, there was a new option available for Virtualization. I enabled that feature & then performed a clean install of VMWare ESXi 4.0 on the system.

After finishing the setup, I then started a VMWare convert to move a 64 Bit virtual machine onto the T3400 system. It finally accepted the T3400 as an acceptable location for 64 Bit virtual machines. Prior to processor replacement and SATA changes in the BIOS, I could not perform a VMWare convert targeting the T3400 system. Every time that I tried to select the T3400 system, VMWare convert would come back saying that the T3400 does not support 64 Bit virtual machines.

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