We have several super micro x6dvl-eg2 servers. All of them were dual xeon with 2gb of ram. Because of the price, we upgraded these units to 8gb of ram. It was cheap. The problem is that the on board Intel 82541GI network chips crap out because they have to be mapped under the 4GB mem region on 32bit OS's. We also found this problem on older x86_64 linux kernels as well. It's fixed in some of the new ones...

Anyway, I would like to know if anyone has tried to install esxi 4.0 on one of these boxes. I understand that 4.0 is a 64bit kernel. Does anyone know if all of the drivers are 64bit userspace? The workaround is to remove the addon raid cards and install a seperate nic in each server, but before I go out and spend any more money on this, I would like to know if the rest of the hardware will work with esxi the way it sits.

Anyway, the specs are:
Super Micro x6dvl-eg2 motherboard
2 * 3.2ghz Xeon HT processor
4 * 2GB DDR2 ECC ram
2 * 750gb Seagate 7200 rpm SATA

We have several units of the same configuration.

What sort of storage controller do the hosts have? While ESX(i) does have a Linux compatability mode for drivers, the vmkernel is not Linux based so I wouldn't expect to see the same problems.

If the CPUs do not support VT-x you will not be able to run 64 bit guests.

The storage controllers are sata. I also doesn't have VT enabled, but I don't expect to run x64 guests here. My intent is to cycle these guy back into service as a primary development server or other light cpu tasks.

I know the servers have on board raid, but I think it's soft raid, but disk redendancy really isn't an issue for these as much of the stateful stuf can live over on our NAS servers.

I'll probably break down and see if I can install it on one of the boxes later this week.

The drivers with ESX(i) don't support software RAID, but if it's an Intel ICH10R or nVidia MCP controller then ESXi can still install (you just get individual disks instead of a RAID array).

The raid issue is understood. As I mentioned, most of the content is stateless, and the stateful content will be saved to the NAS. So if we loose a virtual machine, it only takes a couple minutes to restore it (deploy from template then restore config from our backup scripts). Anyway, I will report back once I get it installed (if it will make it that far).