Our Organization is in the same boat as you- with the same equipment, configuration, and issue.
The beta CD (DELL OPEN MANAGE system installation CD) DOES have the option to load ESX Server 3.0.2+ (+ ?) which you can select- and the utility partition is created- but the installation doesn't really work as you can't ever get the disks to be recognized and the error message indicates that there are no disks in which to create a file system on. I found nothing in the Bios (catamount) that you can change/set to alter the RAID controller.
In researching this- I am able to get RedHat 4 update 5 and RedHat 5 to load- using drivers I acquired from LSI (they are pretty much all the same - Version 3.13-1 using the internal MegaRaid SAS/SATA feature line 8344ELP or 8408E drivers)(which I got from /proc/devices in RHEL 4/5 and investigating what Hex device it was recognizing) . Although there are drivers for RedHat 3 update 7-8 - making driver floppies and using ESX DD at the ESX server install (does ask you for the driver disk- and even loads the driver for megaraid but still doesn't find the disks in which to create file system). It looks like ESX server is using 2.4.21-47.0.1 kernel (uname-a) I'm guessing is RedHat 3 update8 but VMware-ized.
If you look at LSI's site- the newest Megaraid chipsets only support RedHat 4 update 5 and RedHat 5.0. And yes, since the server is not yet GA'd - there is very limited information on it at this time
So therefore, we are stuck too- at the moment. It appears that there is something coded in any of the drivers to only recognize current/recognized adapters/chips (like the PERC 5E, 5i, 4D C, etc).
I would hang on! I would bet that at some point either DELL will come out with the correct (correcteded- or new) drivers for their new line of products or Vmware will release a patch/fix for it to work (or come out with a new ESX version). Why? because in more research- the PERC 6i IS supported in ESX server 3.0.2+ yes, 3.0.2 plus - which from what I have found out is 3.0.2 with a kernel update (a link goes to a DELL site that keeps looping you to the same support site) which I can't find anywhere!
Z.
