Yes, I realise it's unsupported but I'm not after official support, just community advice!
I am trying to boot ESXi 4 (U1 or 2) on a Dell Inspiron 1564 laptop (Core i3-330M, 4GB DDR3) but having no success. The host reboots at the "Starting vmkernel initialization" screen. At a suggestion here I tried ESXi 3.5 U5 which rather than a reboot threw up the following PSOD:
VMware ESX Server 3i [Releasebuild-207095]
NOT_IMPLEMENTED /build/mts/release/bora-207095/bora/vmkernel/main/pagetable.c:413
cr2=0x0 cr3=0x0 cr4=0x600
frame=0x271bcd8 ip=0x62b3e5
es=0xffffffff ds=0xffffffff fs=0xffffffff gs=0xffffffff
eax=0xffffffff ebx=0xffffffff ecx=0xffffffff edx=0xffffffff
ebp=0xffffffff esi=0xffffffff edi=0xffffffff err=-1 eflags=0xffffffff
0x271be40:[0x62b3e5] stack: 0x0, 0x0, 0x0
VMK uptime: TSC: 1675967248 TSC: 47704915960
TSC: 1673428636 cpu0:0)KVMap: 274: Out of kvmap entries (numMPNs=1)
No place on disk to dump data
Having it happen in the same spot would indicate to me that ESXi 4 also has the same problem. Any ideas? To me it seems to be a memory issue, perhaps the Core i3's integrated memory controller is something the vmkernel can't cope with? Hardware-wise the memory passes memtest86 no problems and runs Windows 7/Ubuntu 10.04 without error.
(And yes I realise I can't use the laptop while running ESXi - it's planned to sit in my comms cabinet as a low power, low profile server for a handfull of low-I/O VMs. Had a XPS M1330 in that role before it's owner wanted it back!).
