I have experimented with the free ESXi for the past two weeks. First on an IBM xServer 330 (8674-41X) with dual PIII and built in SCSI, which works fine.
After adding av few VMs I wanted more power and built a new system with an Intel Server Board S3210SLHC, a Xeon X3320 (Quad Core 2,5 GHz) and 4 GB memory (so far).
I could not get ESXi to recognize SATA drives attached to the internal controller (ICH9) so I ended up booting from a USB stick. It seemes to be recognizing the internal controller as "2 port SATA IDE Controller (ICH9)" with vhmba33 and vhmba1 inside the VI client. The USB is recognized as vhmba32. I also logged on to the consoled an ran lspci. There I can see the two controllers as vhmba0 and vhmba1. Since the MB has six SATA ports the first controller is actually a 4 port controller and there is actually a conflict with vhmba0 and vhmba33 (SATA0 to SATA3). The last two ports (SATA4 and SATA5) is a 2 port controller and it works fine when I connect the drives to them.
So now I have a fully working system when I use the last two SATA ports, but the first four is unavailable. Does anyone know how I can enable the first four?
By the way here are the PCI IDs for the two controllers:
8086:2920 Standard dual channel PCI IDE Controller (not working since it is four channel)
8086:2926 Standard dual channel PCI IDE Controller (working)
- Erik
