Primergy RX200 S8 - ESX 6.7 > no boot

[paintballer991]

I received a Primergy RX200 S8(r2) and I want to get ESXi 7.0.1 on it, I have 7.0.1 running on 2 supermicro's one of which has the same hardware (CPU and mem) but for some reason 7.0.1 doesn't load and 6.7.0 also doesn't load which is related to EFI so I even tried to install Legacy and even Legacy does not boot.

I can load the installer and it shows the drives, it installs totally fine but once the install is done and the server reboots I see VMWare ESX in the boot menu as #1 but it never boots and I see no errors. Currently it just immediately boots into the UEFI shell since the ESX boot will not boot.

[paintballer991]

Okay so I think I found the issue. The RAID array uses LSI 2208 chipset which is not supported in 7.0 however there is an article I found on how to get 2108 to work which I would imagine makes 2208 work also BUT I can't even get ESX to see the USB drive I have attached for a test install of ESX onto it to try this articles walkthrough

https://polarclouds.co.uk/esxi7-missing-percs/

[Lalegre]

Hey @paintballer991,

Well first of all let me tell you that your server is not in the HCL for 6.7 and 7. The last supported version was 6.5 u1: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=server&productid=34828&devi...

If you see the recommendations also it is saying that you need to use Legacy BIOS boot mode only. As this probably is a Lab hardware I will try to help you with the second error.

Basically the error is saying that there is not NIC Native driver available and this is probably because the version 7.0 is not supported on your hardware and probably the NIC it has attached also. For solve this if you have vCenter Server, you can use Auto Deploy and Image Builder to inject custom drivers in the ESXi ISO: https://www.vembu.com/blog/how-to-build-custom-esxi-image/.

That is a really good post that I used sometimes and you can do it by using vSphere Client.

[paintballer991]

I forgot to update this. So I know it's not supported but this is in my lab so it doesn't quite matter in terms of compatible according to VMWare and Fuji.

So I finally found how to get the system on ESX 7.0 U2 which it currently is on and will probably hangout on U2 for a little while.

Essentially I had to trial and error the upgrade steps for the machine to get to where it's at now.