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charane1982
Contributor
Contributor

Install ESX on a desktop

Hi All,

I have a HP Z210 Workstation with following hardware config

- Intel Xeon CPU E31225 3.10 GHz

- No of Cores 4

- 6 MB Cache
- Memory 16 GB

- Chipset Intel® PCH C206

I want to make it an ESX server.

Please let me know if it is possible and if so, which ESX iso to use.

Thanks in advance.

- Charudatta Rane

P.S. I am a noob in vmware.

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7 Replies
dales123
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

the model of desktop does not appear to be within vmware's hcl but that's not particularly surprising so it probably wont work, however what you could do is download an evaluation version of vmware workstation and install that within windows which will allow you to create virtual machines within the workstation application. Workstation can be used to run ESX/i so should give you the necessary experience. With 16GB's of ram you should be able to knock up 2 esx hosts and a virtualcenter vm, then either use starwind for iscsi storage on the host windows os or another small vm with something like openfiler.

HTH

Kind Regards Dale VCP3+5
schepp
Leadership
Leadership

Hi, welcome to the forums.

If you already have the hardware I would suggest to just download an ESXi 5 iso and try your luck with installing it. This will be much faster than digging through unofficial whitelists of hardware components I guess. There was a famous Whitebox list for ESX 4 and you HP Z210 was not on that list, just for you to know.

Regards

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eeg3
Commander
Commander

If you're unable to get it working with bare metal ESXi due to NIC compatibility, etc. then nested virtualization running ESXi on top of Workstation is a great choice, as well.

Blog: http://blog.eeg3.net
charane1982
Contributor
Contributor

Hi All,

Thank you for your replies. As suggested I will try with ESXi 5 on the system, and if it works will update this post.

If not, I will have to try to procure an ESX Server itself.

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aravinds3107
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

I will have to try to procure an ESX Server itself.

ESX is no more avilable from vSphere 5 and with your saying "procure ESX server itself ", What is required to install ESXi host is suitable hardware which is supported by VMware, Check VMware HCL for list of hardware

If you plan for study purpose of vSphere you could install it on VMware Workstation, Check this Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 1: The Story

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful |Blog: http://aravindsivaraman.com/ | Twitter : ss_aravind
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CloudConcepts
Contributor
Contributor

Hello,

It might be a bit late to help the TS, but anyway I would like to share this info with the community. I also have purchased 2 x HP Z210 workstations for an ESXi 5 lab. I have the USDT versions with the Xeon E31225 and 16GB of RAM.

I can confirm that, although the workstation is not on the VMware HCL, everything will work with a custom image. The system board comes with an Intel 1001e NIC (Intel 82579LM) which is not supported in ESXi. By using Chilly's driver (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27246203/E1001E.tgz), inserted in the HP OEM ESXi5 U1 image by using ESXi-Customizer (http://esxi-customizer.v-front.de/) I was able to get the NIC working (see screenshots).

For those of you that don't want to do the customizing stuff, I have provided a working copy of this ESXi 5 image on my website (http://www.cloudconcepts.be/downloads/HP_ESXI5U1_E1001e.ISO). I am not responsible for any data loss caused by this, nor can I guarantee that the driver is 100% working. I did a lot of testing with it, and until now I have no issues. The other NIC in the image is a HP NC360T Dual-Port PCIe card added to the configuration.

Good luck with it 🙂

frannosh
Contributor
Contributor

I wanted to share that CloudConcepts' method worked for us using a stock ESXi 5.1 ISO and the same E1000E.tgz driver.  We purchased a few HP 8300 workstations that had the same NIC; these machines are also not on the HCL but it was a fair bet that HP was using the same NIC and driver as on the Z210.  I tried just using ESXi-Customizer to patch in the .tgz without converting to a VIB and it worked flawlessly for us first time out (so yes, I'm `deprecated' but it works).

I could see using this method to make a Super ESXi with all of the HP and Dell drivers that are commonly not included in VMware's image and using it across our entire lab.  Thanks Cloud for the wonderful tool! :-@)

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