I've got a modified ESXi 4.1 working on the following hardware:

- Intel DH57JG motherboard
- Intel Core i5-661 CPU
- Onboard Intel 82578DC Gigabit NIC (8086:10f0)
- Seagate 250GB SATA2 3250318AS

During the installation I had to overcome the following obstacles:

- No CD-ROM drive for installation available
- Onboard NIC not recognized -> Installer fails

The main issue is that the Onboard NIC is not recognized by the installer. Once this is solved you can use any installation method.

I've tried an external CD-ROM, a USB stick and PXE network boot. In the end I've installed the box via PXE but you don't have to.

The key is to create the correct installation image using varazir's script (http://vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4) and to include the matching NIC driver (e1000e2.o) from hardworker which is in this oem.tgz file (http://vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2194). I've used the oem-8086-10f0-v1119.tgz file.

My initial mistake was to just add the oem.tgz to the installation medium by following other tutorials found on the net. There you add the --- oem.tgz to the kernel options but that only includes the NIC driver for the installer and not for the installed ESXi on the hard disk. The aforementioned script does the right thing.

Good to hear,

The problem installing 4.1 from USB is that the installations is hard coded
to install from CD.

As I understand you can go around that using a kickstart file.

Yes, that's true. By using a kickstart file you can get the installer to work. That was my first attempt.

* Format the USB stick with 1 FAT32 partition
* Install syslinux
* Unpack the ISO files onto the stick
* Add the oem.tgz with the custom driver
* Fix the syslinux.cfg file to include the oem.tgz and use a kickstart file

Then after a lot of back and forth the installer runs and installs but the driver is not on the system as the oem.tgz is not installed as the installer only seems to unpack the imagedd.bz2 file onto the disk. I can imagine that you can extend the kickstart file with some custom script which installs the oem.tgz into the right place but I couldn't find a decent example for that. Your script did everything that was required

The only thing I'd like to understand now is why the transfer rate between my MacBook and the box (1 Gbit/s, Full Duplex, no switch) is only up to 1 MB/s when migrating a virtual machine (from Fusion) either with scp or the Converter. I know the management VM is limited and the file system is waiting until the data is written to the disk but isn't there a way to at least temporarily up the performance for large file system transfers?

My script is based on stuff floating around I have just combined them all to one.

I have the kickstart in my script.

Sent from my Desire HD using Tapatalk

I can confirm this board works well.
In addition you can use unsupported CPU with this board. I use i5 760 and I just had to reply "OK" to the warning you are using an unsupported CPU.
I'm pretty sure you can even remove the GFX once the installation is done to replace by a Lan or Storage controller or just save power since you have an option is bios about operating without GFX. By cons configuring a Raid controller without GFX should be tricky but adding a Lan controler or adding a Storage controller while keeping the initial installation disk should cause any trouble. For example install ESXi on a small disk and then remove the GFX, install a raid controller with the disks for the datastores behind and configure the controller using ssh to connect to service console.
By the way I didnt install ESXi using this board but another ITX H55 board and then managed to modify the installed ESXi to use this board.

I just want to quickly add one successful installation of 4.1u1 on the DH57JG board and thank Varazir for the script and hardworker for the driver.

I took the route of creating an ISO-image on a separate Ubuntu with the help of the script. No issues whatsoever.