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Pentium100
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Vmware ESXi on Fujitsu Siemens Primergy N400. Is it possible?

Hello, I am using Vmware Server for now, but want to try ESXi 3.5.0. However, the install did not find a suitable device to install to ( http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/5172/dsc00226kz7.jpg ). I tried a SCSI drive connected to onboard controoler, I also tried CompactFlash card and IDE hard drive (120MB) connected to onboard IDE. It gave me the same message. Is it somehow possible to run ESXi on this server?

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Welcome to the VMware Community forums. Your best bet would be to add a supported controller - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi35_io_guide.pdf. What sort of controllers does the system have? Although unsupported, you can boot from a USB flash drive (but you would still need storage for your VMs - perhaps iSCSI / NFS).

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Pentium100
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SCSI controller is Adaptec AIC-7899, I also have a Promise Ultra133 TX2 IDE controller. It seems that ESXi supports my SCSI controller (but for some reason did not see the scsi HDD), but does not support the IDE controller, which is not good. Oh, and I do not think that the server can boot from USB...

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nick_couchman
Immortal
Immortal

The SCSI controller should be supported under the aic7xxx driver. The Promise controller is probably not supported, but you can try it. ESX and ESXi do not support IDE-based disks. I also had issues with one of my Adaptec controllers seemingly not being recognized by ESXi because ACPI was turned on in the BIOS - seems some of the older ACPI hardware doesn't interact well with ESXi. After disabling it, the controller showed up fine.

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Pentium100
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Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try to disable ACPI. But if ESXi does not support IDE drives and my Promise controller then it will not see my 300GB hard drive, and I'll have to continue to use VM Server and get 10MB/s on a gigabit LAN...

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Peter_vm
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Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try to disable ACPI. But if ESXi does not support IDE drives and my Promise controller then it will not see my 300GB hard drive, and I'll have to continue to use VM Server and get 10MB/s on a gigabit LAN...

And why that would be? You should get 25-70MB/s...

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Pentium100
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For whatever reason it is like that now. Copying a file from host to some other pc in the network gives 25MB/s. Copying the same file from guest is 10MB/s. Reading or writing a file on guest (to a shared folder on host) also gives 10MB/s. I tried giving both cpus tu guest, but it didin't help.

I have a hard drive that the guest has to access and also I want to access it from other PCs in the network. What I understand is I have two options:

1. I mount the hard drive on host, share it. Guest gets 10MB/s, other PCs - 25MB/s.

2.Mount the drive on guest. Now the host has no access and I have to share it from the guest. Now guest has 50MB/s and other PCs 10MB/s.

I thought that maybe ESXi would be faster. Now the host OS is Windows 2003 and guest OS is Windows 2000 Pro. Both host and guest share the same port of Intel PRO/1000 MT dual port server adapter.

Network performance as tested with pcattcp is:

Host-->guest: 15MB/s

Guest->host: 14MB/s

Guest-->other_pc: 19MB/s

Other_pc-->guest: 22MB/s

Other_pc-->host: 50MB/s

Host-->other_pc: 44MB/s

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nick_couchman
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Well, the www.vm-help.com whitebox HCL lists the Promise Ultra 133 TX2 as working in ESXi (http://communities.vmware.com/message/1032398). However, you cannot mount this disk locally on ESXi and share the contents out with any sort of file sharing software because ESXi does not have any file sharing capability (NFS, CIFS, etc.) built in. Also, my experiece so far is that you cannot map local disks directly to VMs in ESXi - you can only map SAN volumes (I'll be happy to be proved wrong on that). So, the only option you have for getting this working in ESXi would be to create a datastore in ESXi on these disks and then create VMDK files in that datastore and then use those disks inside a VM where you could install a file sharing mechanism of sort and share the disks out that way.

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Pentium100
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OK, i'll try that. My hope is that ESXi is faster than Server (especially network, I can add two more cpus to the pc (P3 Xeon 700MHz) to the total of 4, but I do not know if they will improve network performance).

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Peter_vm
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Oh, that might be the reason (P3 Xeon 700MHz). Since virtual NICs are emulated, their use will engage host CPU heavily.

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nick_couchman
Immortal
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Hey, Dave, I think we have a new winner for oldest hardware running ESXi!

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Pentium100
Contributor
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Now there are two CPUs. If I added another two, would they improve network performance?

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Peter_vm
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Unlikely. Normally emulation cannot be spread across multiple host CPUs.

It would help only if your host CPU was very busy doing something else, at the time of the network speed test.

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Pentium100
Contributor
Contributor

No, it wasn't. Also, I did not find ACPI setting in the BIOS, so ESXi does not detect SCSI drives and IDE drive, connected to the Ultra133TX2 controller. It seems I'm stuck with vmserver... Is there a "third" option of sharing a hard drive between host and guest instead of windows file sharing?

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thingy
Enthusiast
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Try the instructions in http://communities.vmware.com/thread/166002 and see if they help you get your disks detected.

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Peter_vm
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No, it wasn't. Also, I did not find ACPI setting in the BIOS, so ESXi does not detect SCSI drives and IDE drive, connected to the Ultra133TX2 controller. It seems I'm stuck with vmserver... Is there a "third" option of sharing a hard drive between host and guest instead of windows file sharing?

Third option? You have listed just one. Sharing with which virtualization product: ESX35i or VMware Server?

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Pentium100
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In one of my previous posts I mentioned two options of sharing a hard drive between host and guest, and they both inolve windows file sharing.

1. Share the drive on host, map it as network drive on guest. 25MB/s to other PCs in the network, 10MB/s to guest.

2. Connect the drive to guest (as a physical disk) and share it from there. 60MB/s to guest, 10MB/s to other PCs.

Is there a way that does not involve windows file sharing? This is on VMServer 1.0.6 (can download the beta if it has such a function).

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