Hey Arno, what bios settings have you set? Also, what kind of processor do you have? I'm going to swap out processors to try again, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Ben,

I have a Q9550 processor that gives me 4 cores of 2,8GHz and has 12MB cache. For me, it gives me (even with 8 VM's windows) plenty of horsepower.

My BIOS is version:
CBQ4510H.86A.0093.2009.0724.1353 (last version of July 24th this year)

I did nothing special about BIOS, just turned on Intel Virtualisation and VT-d and set the sata controller to AHCI.

I had to play with some PCI adapters to make firewire available in one VM and make USB available in another VM. I ended up with disabling the onboard Firewire, put a PCIx1 Firewire card in the PCIx16 slot and put an USB controllercard in the plain oldfashion PCI slot. I had to do it this way because firewire and USB had to be on a different bus if you want to use it in 2 different VM's.

Now it's working just great. I've learned to be careful about hardware selection id you want VT-d and the VMDirectPath PCI passthrough is trial and error to get things working, if it doesn't work; switch cards to other PCI positions and try again.

Too bad ESXi hasn't lm_sensors integrated to do hardware monitoring of fans, power and CPU. It would be great to define some thermal alarms on cpu temperature or on fans failing. If anyone know if it's possible to make this work, please contact me. I know it works just fine on dell server hardware it's a pity it doesn't give full info on this DQ45CB motherboard.

Good luck!

Arno Broeders

My setup worked as well:
DQ45CB Intel Board
Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core
8GB RAM
sata dvd
2 sata hard drives

Adjusted the SATA to AHCI.

Installed without any erros.

Anyone get ESX 4 (not i) installed successfully on this setup?

Perhaps answering my own query, I did find the following and it seems ESX runs albeit with a a shutdown error: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1409076#1409076

hi,

anyone using 802.1q trunking on board internal nic?
intel board specs states that the nic supports it, but in esxi4 i have no option to enable it...

any ideas?
thanks in advance!

Intel® 82567LM Gigabit Ethernet Controller
The Intel 82567LM Gigabit Ethernet Controller supports the following features:
• PCI Express link
• 10/100/1000 IEEE 802.3 compliant
• Compliant to IEEE 802.3x flow control support
• 802.1p and 802.1q
• TCP, IP, and UDP checksum offload (for IPv4 and IPv6)
• Transmit TCP segmentation
• Full device driver compatibility
• PCI Express power management support
• Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) 5.0

You won't configure the VLAN directly on the NIC, but rather at the virtual switch level. Go to Configuration \ Networking and bring up the properties for your vSwitch. Select the Virtual Machine Port Group or VMkernel Port, select edit and you can then set the VLAN id. If you select Add on the vSwitch you also have the option to select the VLAN id when you create a new VM port group or VMkernel port.

thanks dave,

trunking is working now in my setup on DQ45CB.
i changed the setting direktly on the esxi console - added vlan 4095 to accept all (tagged) vlans.