ESXi 6.5 Installer failed (PSOD)

[ProjectD22]

Hey there!

I haven't really worked with ESXi yet but I need install 6.5 onto a HP Compaq Elite 8000 SFF.

It has 8GB of RAM and an 500Gb Samsung EVO 850 SSD.

During the installation I ran into some problems. Here's a picture of the PSOD.

I managed to fix the vsan object issue by using a customized ESXi ISO without the vmkusb driver.

But I didn't got rid of the other problems. Here's what I tried:

-     Using an HDD instead of SSD (same errors)

-     Install ESXi 6.0 (same errors)

-     Install ESXi 6.5 from HP (same errors)

-     Updating BIOS and Firmware by Installing Windows 7 and updating both of them (same errors)

-     Create Custom Image of ESXi 6.5 without vmkusb driver (vsan object Error fixed but the others are still existing)

What am I doing wrong?

Thank you!

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

What you're doing wrong is trying to install a hypervisor on a crippled, old desktop PC that has a CPU/generation which is incompatible with either ESXi 6 or 6.5. It's not meant to be installed on this platform as evident by the PSODs.

[jasnyder]

Well based on the error, which is a page fault, it could be CPU, memory, motherboard, or any other hardware component or driver causing the issue.  So in other words, there's no way to tell just from the error, and it's not dumping a log anywhere that you can inspect for more clues.  I think this may be an uphill battle since there's really no way to troubleshoot the issue, and there's no way to change one variable at a time and test for different outcomes.  If it were me and I were hellbent on making this work, I would possibly try older versions of ESXi and see if they work.  Maybe walk back one major version at a time (obviously 6.5 is a problem, and you already had an issue with 6.0, so start with 5.5, then 5.1, then 5.0).  I don't know if you have access to all those versions and want to spend time on it, but it might give you some clues to figure out at which point in the version chain it stopped working.  If I remember correctly, there was a fairly major shift from 5.1 to 5.5 in terms of dropping driver support from the core build and a similar one from 5.5 to 6.0.  If it's a driver issue, you could then maybe figure out what changed between the last version that worked and the first one that didn't.  Or if it ends up working on an older version, could you settle for using that instead of the latest and greatest?  8GB RAM isn't going to get you much in the way of usable resources on this system anyway.  Depending on what you're trying to do, could you get more mileage out of running virtual ESXi on VMware Workstation on your laptop?  Or skip ESXi and just run the VMs on Workstation directly (obviously that assumes you aren't trying to use ESXi for learning or something)?

[ProjectD22]

Thank you for your answer!

I know this isn't a system to run multiple vms on but i was asked to do so.

I did install version 5.5 now and it is working fine.