Help Installing ESXi 3.5 on Refurbished IBM xSeries 346 Type 8840

[GeoFor]

I have recently purchased the following to build install VMWare ESXi

• 1 - Refurbished IBM xSeries 346 Type 8840

• 2 -90P1305 IBM 73.4 GB 10K RPM Hot Swap Ultra 320 80 Pin SCSI Hard Drives

After shoving in the 2 SCSIs into the hot swap bay, inserting the ESXi install CD and powering up the system, I receive the following error and info:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Installation operation has encountered a Fatal Error :

Unable to find a supported device to write the VMWare ESX ei 3.5.0 image to.

The following system information will assist the VMWare Support team with your problem. Please record this information before Proceeding:

System Information:

Manufacturer: IBM

Model: eServer xSeries -[8840Ac1]-

ServiceTag: KQKN196

Bios Rev: -[http://KPE139AUS-1.14|http://KPE139AUS-1.14]-

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

My first guess is that I am inheriting the configuration of the previous owner, which appears to have had 4 SCSI drives (as opposed to the two that I purchased) and as such, is having problems reconciling the missing hard drives?

If this is the case...is there something I need to do to the server to recognize these different drives so I can continue with the installation. There is nothing on the drives or the previous configuration that I want to keep. Any pointers to any documentation, procedures I can use as reference would be appreciated as well.

[DSTAVERT]

You will also need a supported SCSI RAID controller.

[DSTAVERT]

I believe that server uses/can use the IBM ServeRAID 7k card.

[GeoFor]

Yes... that little bit of info on the RAID 7 helped. I did a search on that with the xSeries 346 and came across the link to the download for the Server Installation CD which allowed me to go in and reset everything to OOTB conditions and was able to setup my server, and the installation went smoothly... now in the process of converting VMWare images to OVF for loading and testing.

For those interested, one of the google search arguments returned the IBM Infocenter for eserver at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver

From there I entered the machine I entered the Product Family, Type, Model and ESX 3,4 as the operating system after poking around found the server install cd which I downloaded, burned onto CD, and booted the system which provided me with the tools to re-establish the server configuration.

If it works... it would be great! I'll have spent only $350.00 for a server and 2 raid hard drives... can't beat that price.