I tried ESXi 3.5 Update 1 on a laptop with ICH7 controller and it works fine. This laptop has the centrino chipset.
But trying the same on a newer laptop with the centrino pro chipset with 4 GB RAM and and ICH8M chipset the SATA controller will not be recognized even in SATA AHCI native mode. My question is there a chance in having this support in later firmware updates? My deviceID is 8086:2828.
Regards
gi-minni
Not very likely. ESX currently only officially supports SAS controllers, and it's unlikely to change.
You may have more success installing VMware ESX inside of VMware workstation on your laptop. There are numerous threads on the forums on how to achieve this. This site also has some guides on the topic: http://www.xtravirt.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=99&Itemid=124
ok, thx for pointing me to virtualizing esxi server inside Workstation 6,
but I am afraid that this could be a performance bottleneck and this
kind of support does not exist anymore in Workstation 6.5 due to performance constrains.
I could find a list with supported ICH7 boards around here
and I can report that my laptop with ICH7 chipset and e1000 network support is running fine,
having a local vmfs3 datastore stored on the internal SATA disk.
But only the newer laptops with centrino pro chipset can address all the 4GB RAM space.
And booting from such a machine the vmkernel can address all the max. amount of RAM.
This is the reason why I am asking for ICH8(M) support inside the esx 3i vmkernel.
Is there someone from the vmware people that can tell more about that?
Nice list. However, take care to not confuse "supported" with "functional."
If you're interested in performance, ESX on a laptop is probably not a good starting point in the first place... what are your goals in getting it to work?
(...there's a Workstation 6.5?)
As mentioned ESX works with a number of SATA controllers but will not likely be ever supported by VMware. That said, the PCI map file for ESXi does list 8086:2828 using the ata_piix driver. Do you have any other modes for the SATA controller (native / IDE)? How are you obtaining the PCI id?
Yes we add support for newer ICH regularly.
> what are your goals in getting it to work?
We have a big ESX clusterfarm with several server running Converter, DRS, HA, Consolidated Backup feature.
My Idea is to develop, work and demo VMware instances inside the above mentioned environment and if I have an inhouse workshop use this environment accordingly.
At the time I need to attend a fair or visit our customers. I need the ability to carry the VMware instances with me and also
beeing able to give our customer an onsite demonstration at their location. Then I exchange my internal working disk with a formatted vmfs3 datastore
move the VMware instance with VMotion to this local datastore and carry the laptop to my customer location and convince them to buy.
Please think also about security,firewall, VPN, Network performance constraints. It is a pain to setup all this things correctly having more than one
VMware instances running.
IMHO it is better having the hole scenario thin and portable.
The only thing that I need is another laptop or workstation to manage VIC or our admin/devel/runtime GUI's.
But this last task is the no brainer" part of all
> (...there's a Workstation 6.5?)
AFAIK there is an ongoing beta, and in the forum there is an info about removing the boot support for ESXi 3.5
Hi Dave,
Do you have any other modes for the SATA controller (native / IDE)?
Yes, I have the ahci sata and compatibility (ide) mode
In ahci sata mode I cannot see anything, no controller, no vmhba at all
and no ahci module no ide module are loaded!
In compatibility mode I see the controller module ata_piix loaded (See below)
How are you obtaining the PCI id?
Going in tech support modus and executing lspci -pv.
The result of that is here. (the laptop is now in compatibility mode)
00:31.02 8086:2828 17aa:20a8 255/ /0x81 B V vmhba0
Executing esxcfg-module -l results in (excluding the rest):
ata_piix true true
I miss 00:31.02 8086:2828 17aa:20a8 255/ /0x81 B V ata_piix vmhba0
because looking on my other working laptop with the ICH7M chipset there
is the name of the loaded module between V and the vmhba's
Yes we add support for newer ICH regularly.
Thx for your reply, I am kindly asking you at what time can we expect an update for ICH8(M)?
I just tried to install the ESXi free version on a system with ICH8M and it did not find any disks for install.
Really to bad
Nobody any hints on drivers or workarounds to get ESXi working on a ICH8? IDE compatiblity mode is not an option, since my BIOS does not allow to set this. Anybody knows the schedule when this will be supported?
Take a look through this thread - http://communities.vmware.com/thread/158987?tstart=0