Having extreme woes with the Intel SASUC8I that I bought... it's *not* based on the LSI3081E-R -- it's based on the LSI1608E-R.

Are you sure that you've got a SASUC8I?

We're using the DQ67OW as well, and all works fine with the drivers you pointed at, but 2% into the disk image install from CD, it craps out with an 'unable to write image to disk' error...

Ah yes, but the LSI3081E-R is based on the LSI1608E chip. So it is actually that controller and I have used the firmware from that controller on the intel version.

Personally I did not have any problems with this controller. I currently do not have it in use anymore, but I did have it installed for 2 weeks and ran some VM's offef it, no problem. I do have to note that I never used it to install ESXi onto, I use a seperate USB stick for that.

So no idea why you are getting that error? Try another CD-rom player maybe? Especially with the 4.1 version of ESXi! It's known to have trouble with all kinds of cd/dvd players, even those in HP servers!

Aha! Gotcha - Way to go, LSI! with your nice unambiguous numbering system

We actually had a breakthrough today... by accident...

The problem seems to be caused by the Intel SATA-RAID on the motherboard.

We had it disabled in the BIOS, which seemed sensible as we wanted to use the LSI RAID card, and it consistently failed to install ESXi onto the LSI RAID array with all arrangements of disks etc.

However - with the Intel on-board SATA-RAID *enabled* (in RAID mode), the ESXi installation to the LSI RAID runs through without a problem...

Go figure!

Server is now up and converting VMs onto it. Thanks for pointers to Intel network drivers...

-Craig

Sure, no problem, here to help!

Glad to hear you got everything working now! Yeah, VMware kind of doesn't really listen to the bios it seems sometimes. So with the device disabled, it doesn't know what to make of it and just fails. It shouldn't give you anymore problems after this I expect.

Just a little update. This board is happily running VMware ESXi 5.0 for months allready and yesterday I upgraded the memory to 32GB (4x8GB stick, corsair value) without a problem!