VMWare ESXi Server 3.5

Question

I am trying to install VMWare ESXi 3.5 on a DELL GX280 machine which has SATA configurations. As ESXi doesn't support SATA, i am not able to proceed.

I could able to install on IDE (which is also not supported) by making some changes. Is there a way to install on SATA as well??

Please let me know if anyone has tried it.

Thanks, Shwetha

Answer 1

This is a more appropriate question for the VMware forums than here.

That said, ESXi supports SATA drives with no worries - I'm running a single SATA drive for boot with 4 additional SATA drives plugged into a Adaptec 2405 RAID controller for storage. Fully supported configuration.

Answer 2

Newer versions ESX support a few SATA chipsets. At some point, the supported chipsets were:

• mptscsi_2xx (PCIE) ‐ LSI1078
• mptscsi_pcie ‐ LSI1068E (LSISAS3442E)
• mptscsi_pcix ‐ LSI1068 (SAS 5)
• aacraid_esx30 ‐ IBM serveraid 8k SAS controller
• cciss ‐ Smart Array P400/256 controller