I have a semi-legit home environment/lab with a half-rack. A few servers run Hyper-V and the rest run ESXi 5.5u1a (Build 1746018). No problems there.
Over the last roughly two weeks I have lost a few power supplies, motherboards, BBU's for RAID cards and other. This is a bit of a blessing in disguise as I now have an opportunity to tear the whole system apart to consolidate some things, shift things around, upgrade where funds allow, etc. etc. I had vCenter Server Appliance running within my cluster (I know bad practice) and it bit me in the rear end when things went down. This is why I am trying to get the following machine up running ESXi 5.5u1a (Build 1746018) -- so that I can temporarily manage the machines, move VM's and data around, etc. so that I can sort this mess out easier.
The machine is a Gateway SX2855-UR30P (rebranded Acer something or other) running an i3 2120 CPU with 4GB of non-ECC (desktop) RAM and I believe Intel H61 Express chipset. I understand that this is not supported hardware (it is junk desktop hardware). I installed a cheap video card with 512mb of RAM to get around the memory checks and I made a slipstream ISO using the Gen-3 NIC drivers (found here http://www.virten.net/2013/09/esxi-5-x-installation-on-intel-nuc-fails-with-no-network-adapters/ ) to get around the non-supported onboard Intel 82579v NIC on the motherboard.
ESXi 5.1 Update 1 Build 1065491 works fine booting from a 2GB USB thumb drive.
Between reading the VMware KB's and having a moderate understanding of the difference between updates, upgrades and installs... Logic tells me that I should be able to update and/or upgrade (but not install) at least to 5.1u3 (Build 2323236) on the box, and as long as the drivers/VIB's are compatible, all the way up to 5.5u1a (Build 1746018)...
But nothing works past ESXi 5.1 Update 1 Build 1065491. Everything installs properly then during the initial boot (remove media and reboot) it freezes at the "Initializing ACPI..." on the yellow screen.
What am I missing? I see plenty of others posting around the web that they can save the old 5.0 VIB's and install/slipstream/force them into 5.5 installs or upgrades.... Why am I hanging at ACPI on each boot running anything higher than Build 1065491. And... What driver or where can I find the drivers that are working on Build 1065491 so that I can include them in the later upgrades?
Thanks for any help.
