Disabling USB in bios typically means it's not available to anything since it's completely off. IF you really wanted to use the USB passthrough of ESXi 4.1, then you'll want supported hardware...
FYI, VMware ESX/ESXi is NOT your typical OS... It's a bare metal hypervisor. As such it has to interact on a much deeper level than other operating systems do, hence the need for the hardware to be on the HCL... I've gotten to the point where if the hardware isn't on the VMware HCL, or something that has proven to have zero issues by many people testing it with great success, I wouldn't even consider using it.
I kind of got lucky with my current ESXi host, although all the time I spent on research before making the purchase took most of the luck part out of the equation. I made sure the drive controller (hardware RAID) was on the HCL as were the processors, and pretty much everything I could check. Plus, I had several deeply technical conversations with Dell engineers BEFORE I made the purchase. I then provided them with feedback on the success of the install, so that they would know it would work (even if it wasn't 100% supported in that configuration).
IF you really want to build a whitebox to run ESX/ESXi, then get a server motherboard, use server processors (Xeon's, nothing else), with a hardware RAID controller (with BBWC), SAS hard drives, ECC memory, etc... Before you start investing in all of that, though, check the major manufacturers (and their outlet sites) to see if they are offering any servers that ARE on the VMware HCL at a better rate... You could pick up a Dell R710 server with one or two drives in it for a good rate... At that point, turn your current box into a SAN and place the VM's there... You could even try the method of running ESXi 4.x from an USB flash drive (2-8GB in size), since you'll be able to leave USB enabled on the host...
VMware VCP4
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