I recently decided to virtualize my computers here at home using VMware’s ESXi. When I moved I realized I had a little too much computer equipment. Not to mention when all of them were running my electric bill would get a little ridiculous while these machines mostly idled. I ended up purchasing an HP Proliant ML115 G5 which is HP’s entry level tower server. They’re not officially supported by ESXi but after some googling I found the ML110’s (Intel) and ML115’s (AMD) have become popular vmware hosts for small setups. The only problem I had which I knew before purchasing it was the Nvidia MCP55 SATA controller was a pain. Most of the instructions I found for working around it were for ESX and not relevant to ESXi. While ESX does not recognize the MCP55 and needs PCI ID and kernel module information, ESXi does recognize the controller but will not let you use it. The problem is ESXi only recognizes PATA interfaces and loads the ide module instead of sata_nv and the installer blocks installs on IDE connected drives. I found the following patch here in the comments section which works around this.
Just remember that you need to patch the file within install.tgz and can’t use oem.tgz on the installer image for this.
Hi Tom,
I also run in the same problem with a HP XW4200, and fixed this with the same patch few weeks ago
- miwi
Comment by Martin Wilke — November 13, 2008 @ 5:47 pm
[...] FreeBSDish [...]
Pingback by Virtualization on a HP Proliant ML115 G5 : Blade Watch — November 17, 2008 @ 4:39 pm
Hi Tom,
I have been looking for a solution to this problem on a ML115 G5 for a while now. Can you please explain how I go about integrating this patch with ESXi. Thanks in advance
Chris
Comment by Chris Kyte — November 24, 2008 @ 6:29 am
Chris, I ended up using these instructions to create a USB stick which were in a different post from the same blog mentioned above.
http://www.grid.org/blog/cameron/development-using-vmware-server-esxi
My laptop is running Fedora right now and I wasn’t able to figure out how to alter the contents of an ISO file on Linux. Couldn’t find a freeware program to do it on Windows either. On FreeBSD you can mount the ISO with `mdconfig` and alter the contents.
Comment by tmclaugh — December 1, 2008 @ 2:37 pm
@tmclaugh.
In linux, just mount the iso (man mount) and modify contents. Then unmount.
Comment by Victor — May 8, 2009 @ 4:47 am
IIRC when I mounted the .iso as a loop type it was read only.
Comment by tmclaugh — May 8, 2009 @ 12:52 pm
[...] http://blogs.freebsdish.org/tmclaugh/2008/11/11/vmware-esxi-on-an-hp-proliant-ml115-g5/ [...]
Pingback by Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman (fenris) 's status on Tuesday, 18-Aug-09 19:12:55 UTC - Identi.ca — August 18, 2009 @ 2:13 pm