Please assist with compatibility

[Keegan_P]

Good day,

Please can somebody provide assistance on compatibility with below build,

Intel i7-4790 3.6GHz

MSI H97 gaming 3 Motherboard

MSI Global H97 GAMING 3

Kingston 8GB DDR-1600

Memory | Search

Supermicro SAS/SATA RAID controller AOC-USAS2LP-H8iR

Super Micro Computer, Inc. - Products | Accessories | Add-on Cards | AOC-USAS2LP-H8iR

Did I leave out anything else?

I tried the compatibility guide, but it just way too complicated.

Thank you for your help.

Regards

Keegan

[peetz]

Hi Keegan,

the system as a whole is for sure not supported by VMware, but nevertheless you can get ESXi installed and running on that box if the individual components are supported.

The disk controller and NIC are both crucial:

- The RAID controller should be supported with the megaraid_sas driver. HCL entry that applies: VMware Compatibility Guide: I/O Device Search

- But what NIC is on the motherboard?

If the onboard NIC is not officially supported then you may get it running with a community developed driver. Or you just add another NIC to the system that is on the HCL.

According to unsupported NICs you will find this blog post helpful: http://www.v-front.de/2014/12/how-to-make-your-unsupported-nic-work.html

Andreas

[Keegan_P]

Hi Andreas,

Thank you for your response,

That doesn't sound to good then. :smileyhappy:

I am not sure what NIC the board has, as we are spec-ing a PC for one of our clients,

So we haven't purchased the hardware as yet for them.

The alternative we have is an Intel entry level server with below spec's, will this work?

Intel S1200V3RPS Server board

Intel Xeon E3-1230V3 3.3GHz quad core

Transcend 24GB (3 x 8GB DDR3-1600)

Intel RAID controller RS2BL040 (4CH 6G SAS)

[vNEX]

This looks better it should work without issues all is on VMware HCL including RAID:

VMware Compatibility Guide: I/O Device Search

VMware Compatibility Guide: System Search

Message was edited by: vNEX in addition I am quite convinced that the first specs with driver injection will work too but I would suggest to use it for home Lab if you will buying this for the customer definitely go for supported hardware.

[peetz]

Yes, this one is fully supported ...

But you may want to consider adding more RAM. It's always the first bottleneck that you will run into, but it's cheap and even the free ESXi 5.5 license does not have a RAM limit anymore.

[vNEX]

Hello,

Check this link for Intel VT supported motherboards:

Desktop Boards Compatibility with Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT)

For Supermicro SAS/SATA RAID controller AOC-USAS2LP-H8iR which is based on LSISAS 2108 controller ...  beacuse some of the previous devices no are no longer supported ...

VMware KB: Devices deprecated and unsupported in ESXi 5.5  

you will have to go through the steps below to get it working again:

TinkerTry IT @ home | How to make ESXi 5.0 recognize an LSI 9265-8i RAID controller

Download VMware ESXi 5.5 Driver for LSI MegaRAID SAS Adapters - See more at:

VMware vSphere 5: Private Cloud Computing, Server and Data Center Virtualization

If you want to know about other vendors supportability and have a list of all supported NICs have a look to this PDF:

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/pdf/vi_io_guide.pdf

For hardware compatibility difficulties in lab/home environment as workaround you can run ESXi as nested in VMware Workstation instead of deploying it directly to your laptop hardware, for more info see:

VMware KB: Support for running ESXi/ESX as a nested virtualization solution