Can I manualy build driver disk for installation ESX 3.0.2 on IBM 306m?

[sady]

I have IBM 306m with two SAS disks. RedHat Enterprise Linux 4u3 installed pretty well with appropriate driver disk from ibm site. However, when ESX installation started with

#esx dd

on driver diskette, that i used for RHEL, report "no drivers for your hardware found on that disk"(or something like that). Without drivers installer found two separate hard drives(no matter, was they included in RAID, or not). Than it install without warnings, and after reboot

-mounting root ...Segmentation Fault

displayed on booting.

I noticed that ESX installation program much like RHEL. installer.

Is there way to build driver for ESX kernel from source of driver provided by ibm?

[peetz]

You cannot use the plain Linux drivers with ESX. The ESX vmkernel's drivers are based on the Linux drivers, but VMware has modified the source code to make them work in the VMKernel context. Since they are using and modifying code copyrighted under the GPL they are forced to re-distribute their modifications under GPL, too. This is why you can download the modified driver sources here:

http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/open_source.html

A Linux kernel hacker might probably build its own vmkernel driver based on the examples given here, but - even if you managed to do this - you would not have any support of VMware for this driver.

So, you need to wait for VMware providing a suitable driver CD for you (like they have done before for other RAID controllers, see here: http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/drivers_tools.html)

\- Andreas

[sady]

thanks

i will try to build driver...