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Irishdunn
Contributor
Contributor

ESX 3.5 on ICH7R?

I am new to ESX, never done an install. I have been using VMware server/workstation for about a year now.

I have an intel D945GN mobo with a Pentuim D 965 + 4GB ram that I would LOVE to install ESX 3.5 on to do my own testing/playing around.

I know that the SATA support is limited for ESX, and I have seen issues with the ICH7 controller... is there any chance that I can get this to work AND install VM's?

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4 Replies
Datto
Expert
Expert

Someone says they have the ICH7R working here:

ASUS P5BV-E/SAS Intel ICH7R Working http://communities.vmware.com/message/862412#862412

Also, if that doesn't work, you might want to look at getting some shared storage setup on another box using NFS or iSCSI -- the directions for setting that up for ESX to utilize are a . You could get another box with Win2003 and Microsoft Services for Unix setup and put some NFS space on that Win2003 box where ESX could locate some VM virtual disks.

Hope that helps.

Datto

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

ESX will recognize the the ICH7 controller (with the device ID shown below) and as posted it has worked for others (but it is not supported). I've seen that RAID setup won't work on these cards and you might have to change the BIOS setting for the SATA controller to set it to IDE mode or other to get ESX to recognize it.

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Datto
Expert
Expert

Looks like the guy that had that ICH7R controller working (that I had posted above) didn't get VMFS formatting to work with it -- only could use the SATA drive attached as the location for ESX boot files.

Datto

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

From his post

>But, what has me scratching my head is that 3.5 installs, allows me to create a VMFS and deploy VMs even though I only have 1 SATA drive connected to the ICH7R controller (I'm not even using the SAS controller!).

so it worked OK for him, he just wasn't expecting that it would work.

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