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kenapp
Contributor
Contributor

Thunder n3600QE (S4980) MoBo with nVIDIA nVidia nForce Pro 3600 (MCP55 Pro) chipset

Hi,

This is my first post here. I am evaluating hardware to purchase for an ESXi deployment. I have found that the NIC on this board is on the VMware HCL, but there is scant information on the other componenets of this chipset.

I am planning on purchasing a Tyan Transport GT24 (B4980) barebones server with the Tyan Thunder n3600QE motherboard (nvidia MCP55 Pro chipset) &2 AMD Opteron 8347HE processors.

My main concern is the SATA storage controller with this chipset. I have found some postings here regarding an older generation of this chipset (nvidia MCP55) and work arounds for the controller. I am hoping to do a RAID 1 setup with this hardware.

Has anyone here had experience with this specific mobo/chipset and VMware ESXi? If not, is there any documentation that you know of that states whether this works?

Thanks,

Ken

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Hello Ken, welcome to the VMware Community forums. The driver that comes with ESXi for MCP controllers doesn't support software RAID so you'd just be able to individual drives. Have you looked at the official HCL for servers? There might be another server brand that might meet your needs and be supported as well.

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kenapp
Contributor
Contributor

Thank you Dave for posting your reply.

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Netzarim
Contributor
Contributor

I have this cobo with 8347 Opterons. Whn I try to install, I get the following message when installing ESXi U4:

"No Supported microcode levels for this stepping of AMD Family 10h B2 processor"

I need access to SATA drives for this install so reverting to U2 is not really an option, even U3 did not recognize the Adaptec 61605 card - although there may be a workaround to load the driver for that. But when I booted from USB to U3 I saw alot of errors related to the same error.

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Netzarim
Contributor
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Incidentally... the U2 Release loads, and runs for the most part... But the system still registers the procs as unsupported.. In was of the alt-? screens... Also, I see a lot of soft-cpu hangs on the Ubuntu VMs running latest virtualization kernels... Som of these hangs have lasted 1800s. Which is rediculous.... Unable to locate the bit in the bios to block the TLB errata data. Bios level is 1.02, latest release from Tyan

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