ESXi support for HP Z800 Workstation

[JensMarkussen]

Hi,

We are trying to install ESXi v4 on a ESXi Workstation, but have issues. During boot, we get the following message:

ESXi 4.0 http://www.vmware.com

• No compatible network adapter found. Please consult the product’s

• Hardware Compatibilty Guide (HCG) for a list of supported adapters.

Believe that the network adapter is a dual Broadcom 5764.

Looking at the support page for drivers:

http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_downloads/vmware_esxi/4#drivers_tools

I do not see that adapter listed.

Any idea? Could one of the other broadcom drivers possibly work.

Any help would be appreciate.

Regards,

Jens

[DSTAVERT]

You can have a look through http://vm-help.com for some hints. Especially look at http://vm-help.com/esx40i/Hardware_support.php If the card uses the same drivers as already installed it may be as simple as editing the simple.map file and adding PCID of your card. A simple tool for identifying the PCID http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/14304.html

[LarryJones]

Were you able to get past this problem? I am running into the same issue on my Z800 now.

[JensMarkussen]

Hi Larry,

No, unfortunately I have not been able to resolve this. The suggested Novell CD was not able to execute correctly on the Z800, so no progress towards incorporating the correct drivers (if that is the issue).

I've raised the issue internally (I work for HP), but so far no positive news here.

Even though this model is a workstation rather than a server, it does seem strange that it is not supported out of the box. It is certainly powerful enough to run ESXi for our purpose.

Any further hints from anyone would be greatly appreciated,

Regards,

Jens

[LarryJones]

Well I got past this error by purchasing an HP NC382T network adapter. After applying some firmware and driver updates, ESXi let me get to the next step in the process only to throw another error!

Now I get a screen that states it was "unable to find a supported device to write the VMware ESXi 4.0.0 image to". I then found a version of the software install that says it's for HP machines and tried that and got the same error (with a longer error number at the top).

I guess I get to start researching this problem now.

If this can't run on what is an above average machine, than I am really wondering if this is worth it!

[deejerydoo]

Hi Jens,

Did you ever get this working?

Cheers,

David.