Hello,

Posting my whitebox that I got a lot of help with from previous questions on these forums. So thanks all!!

i5-2500K
Asus P8H67-M
16GB RAM
2x 1TB HDD

Booting from a USB stick

Using onboard 8111e network. Used RTL8111_8168-8.018.00_P55_integr_SATA_Ctrl.(AHCI).oem.tgz with varazir script.

Horrible network until changing to VXMNET3 adaptors and adding DisableTaskOffload=1 parameter to registry.

As another user, had to change HDD controller from AHCI to RAID in the motherboard for ESXi to see my HDDs as data stores(strange...)

Been running fine for 4 days now, I have 9 low load Windows Server 2003 VMs running concurrently with very nice performance.

I would say the networking is slow. I'd probably recommend to anyone else just buying an Intel NIC to speed that up and just save headaches in general. I may buy one soon.

Thanks again to all who post here, the past posts and Varazir script were invaluable resources!

ETA: ESXi 4.1 Update 1

Hi Rob,

I´m trying to install vmware esxi 4.1.0 release 260247

but after click F11 key to Accept and Continue in End User License Agreement window, he give me this message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "ThinESX.py", line 8, in <module>
Installer.Start()
....
vmkctl.HostCtlException: Unable to load module /ust/lib/vmware/vmkmod/vmfs3: Failure

I already change the SATA Mode to RAID Mode..

Hardware List:

i7-2600K
Asus P8H67-M (BIOS Version 0901 x64)
16GB RAM
2x 1TB HDD

Do u have this type of issue?

Thanks

Hi, that's probably because it's not detecting a supported network card. Your motherboard has a Realtek LAN controller onboard, so your options are (1) customise the installation to add the appropriate drivers, (2) install another card such as Intel or (3) install ESXi 5.0 which has the Realtek drivers already included.

Good luck, Tony S

Indeed, I had to customize the installation using the Varazir script and the file I mentioned in my OP. It should be OK once you do that.

Just to update I've been running for several months now, never bothered to buy an Intel NIC and it is great - I'm running 14 W2003 VMs, 1 linux and a W2008 concurrently.

Good luck!

Rob

Hi all,

Looking at upgrading my current system to what has been mentioned in these posts.

I do have a question around hard drives. I was looking at putting in a couple of 1TB sata drives and hopefully establish a basic mirror using the onboard controller. In the past I have always found esx showing both drives regardless of what I do.

Is this still the case with 4.1 / 5 ?

I'm not familiar with this board, but in cases where ESXi sees two disks instead of a RAID volume it is because the controller is software RAID (versus hardware RAID). The drivers with ESXi don't enable software RAID.

Hello,
i have the exact same configuration and can't make ESXi to recognize the RAID, in bios everything looks k, but during the installations, ESXi points me to select one of the two drives.

I'm sure that is hardware raid because i checked with the manufacture of this motherboard.

Can you pls tell me what you did in order to use RAID?

Do you know the model of storage controller that it used?