ESX 3.5 on Intel S3200SH or S3210SH server board

[aliv]

Hello.

ESX 3.5 can be successfully installed on Intel S3000 which is an old low-end server board from Intel. Some time ago S3000 has been replaces by S3200.

Attempt to install ESX3.5 on S3200 also know as S3210 fails in case SATA mode set to AHCI in bios (i.e. installer can't see CDROM nor HDD). CDROM problem is easily solved by accessing install images over FTP or HTTP.

If I'm, selecting IDE as SATA mode - installer works just fine.

It could be, that ICH9 is just not normally supported on this board by ESX 3.5, but there is another question. It's reported, that ESXi 3.5 (free version of ESX) can be successfully installed on S3200 in AHCI mode.

The question is: what will be working faster in case of two HDDs and 7-8 virtual machines on 8GB 2.4GHz Quad core Intel CPU: ESX 3.5 with IDE or ESXi 3.5 with AHCI?

It's planned as a production machine for testing.

Thanks,

Aliv

[aliv]

Are there any ideas about performance? As always - need to make decision quickly Thanks!

[narayanbalakris]

Were you able to figure out why this was so - I am having a very similar problem...

[sflanders]

By 'two HDDs', I assume you mean two internal hard drives being used as the datastore for the VMs? Are you using a RAID? If performance is really of importance I would focus less on IDE vs. AHCI and more on firmware RAID / shared storage. AHCI typically gives better performance, but if you are talking 8 VMs for two drives depending on what you are actually testing, I would be more focused on number of spindles.