After some trial and error. I have the Intel DQ45CB motherboard working with a few exceptions. I had to:

Set the hard drive to achi mode in the bios.
Enable VT and TXT support in the bios.
Since the on board networking didn't work, I purchased an Intel 1000bt networking adapter.

ESXi finally worked, however, I still cannot run 64bit VM's. I'm currently running 3 Windows 2008 server 32bit VM's without issues. I'm using the latest bios update.

If anyone has any advice on why 64bit VM's aren't functioning, I'd like to hear it.

Try booting with this CD image to get a report of what ESXi will be able to see in terms of CPU capabilities - http://www.vmware.com/download/shared_utilities.html.

What model of CPU do you have?

I have a CORE 2 DUO E7400 2.8G (1066Mhz) processor used on this board. I did try the CD image from vmware and it confirmed that 64bit guest was not supported. Do you think swapping out the CPU would help?

I did boot the same CD on my other system having an Abit AB9 Pro with a CORE 2 DUO E6320 1.86G (1066Mhz) and that displayed support for 64bit guest. Go figure, the older hardware would be better...

According to this the E7400 doesn't have Intel-VT hence the inability to run 64 bit guests. A CPU change should fix that, but I'd also check the BIOS of the MB to ensure that it enables you to turn VT on (it may display as Intel Vanderpool or Intel Virtualization Technology).

Hi and thanks for the post

Have you tested if teh on-board RAID mirroring works with this board?
Any luck getting the on-board network adaptor going?

-garry

Hi Garry, I'll assume it's an Intel ICH*R controller and if so the driver with ESXi doesn't support software RAID so you won't get a raid array to work - ESXi will only see the individual drives.

For the NIC do you know the model? Try the following commands at the console

esxcfg-nics -l (should return nothing)
vmkload_mod /mod/e1000.o
vmkload_mod /mod/e1000e.o
esxcfg-nics -l if you see vmnic0 then you need to edit oem.tgz and add a simple.map file which has an entry in it for your NIC.

Hi Ben!
Thank you for sharing your infomation. I build up my vmware computer as follows:

Intel Q9550
Intel DQ45CB
Intel Pro/1000 GT Desktop
SATA Segate 500 GB
SATA DVD Pioneer

I manage to install the vmware ESXi following your stop with some tuning in the BIOS setting.

However, it seems that the SATA DVD on the ESXi machine wouldn't be recognized in VMWARE ESXi so I can't use the DVD for Virtual Machine OS installation.

Do you face the same problem? How did you overcome it?

Thanks for sharing.
cuchuoi.

The ability to use a host cd-rom in a guest VM depends on the driver that is used. See the kb article here - http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008673.

THanks Dave. Your KB does answer my question! my mode is AHCI/SATA so guest OS cann't access the host DVD.

I am using the client device DVD, slow but working.
cuchuoi

If you plan to use the CD a number of times, you can copy it to the datastore and use the datastore ISO option. Or there are a number of cloning scripts out there.