Installing ESXi on an HP DC 7800 PC

[marius1]

I read in various forums comments from people installing ESX or ESXi on desktop PCs, including HP DC 7xxx PCs.

Can asnybody please advise how to install ESXi on an HP DC 7800 PC for pure testing and self-training purpose?

Have I to dedicate the whole PC to ESXi or can I use a (large enough) free partition?

Is there any warning to consider?

Regards

Marius

[Rubeck]

Taken from this thread http://communities.vmware.com/message/883734#883734

"hp dc 7800:

installs when you add an supported NIC to the system. Builtin NIC is NOT WORKING!

SATA drive is only detected as "hda" ->> NO VMFS support"

/Rubeck.

[marius1]

Can anybody please provide the model of an additional network card that is supposed to work on an HP DC 7800?

Regards

Marius

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You could try an Intel Pro 100 or I use Intel Pro 1000 GT NICs. There's a white box list here to check out - www.vm-help.com. Also on the site is a list of hardare that ESXi will see. It might give you an idea for other NICs.

If you seach the ESXi forum, you'll find one thread about successfully dual booting ESXi, but you can also run ESXi in a VM (on Workstation 6.0 or 6.5 beta) if you have a PC with Intel-VT or a recent AMD processor.

[rpcblast]

the intel pro 1000/gt are about $25 from newegg and work fine. I recently went through the same issues with a dc7800p. The sata drives do appear to support vmfs(unless esxi is lieing and using some other format), but you cannot use the built in raid. What we did was dropped in a pair of intel pro1000/gts, and a lsi8708 raid controller, and put two drives in raid 1 for the OS, and 4 500s in raid 5 for the actual VMs. So far, we are running 6 servers and 3 test workstation machines(granted not a huge load) and not having any issues. We did up the ram to 8g, and are running the e8300.

[Jeff_MacPherson]

That is correct, disk and nic needs to be updated. I actually dropped in a cheap scsi raid card (Dell Perc3) with an old 10k 146gb scsi drive for a friend. NIC, I found a dual port gigabit pci-x. backward compatible with PCI. Using 2gb ddr2 dimms, got 6gb total.. can go to 8gb on it..

[joshgoes]

For those who are having trouble getting the SATA disk working on a HP DC7800P (I'm using a Small Form Factor box) I found a precious article at http://communities.vmware.com/message/1065437 about SATA and ICH9 with ESXi.

Traditionally, the hard-drive is plugged into the SATA0 socket (dark blue) and the CD-ROM is plugged into the SATA1 (white) socket. After reading the article and discovering the issue with SATA0-SATA3 I tried plugging the hard-drive into SATA4 (as SATA0, SATA1 and SATA4 are the only sockets on the mainboard)... and it worked without any "unsupported" tweaking necessary!

3.5.0 Update 2 was used.

I hope this helps!