mcwill
Expert
Expert

I have to disagree, just because two boards share the same chipset it doesn't mean they will work equally well with ESX. The BIOS can also affect compatibility, which means you need to specifiy boards and not chipsets.

For example on two AMD boards with the same chipset one bios allowed switching the MPS Table between versions 1.1 & 1.4 whereas the other was locked at 1.4. ESX would only run on both boards at 1.4 with APIC disabled, but as one board allowed MPS v1.1 it ran ESX without the need to disable APIC.

IMHO the two main areas of problems with whitebox compatibility are NICs and storage adapters; as these are board specific and not chipset specific it may be worthwhile compiling a list of boards along with whether the onboard NIC or storage is ESX compatible.

eg:

Abit KV8 Pro, NIC = No, Storage = No

Reply
0 Kudos