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VMware ESXi 5.0 on ASRock ION 330

⇒ Update: VMware ESXi 5.1 on ASRock ION 330

VMware ESXi 5.0 has recently been released. Since the NVIDIA MCP79 chipset is not officially supported one has to create a custom installer to install / upgrade ESXi 5.0 on the ASRock ION 330 system. Using ESXi Customizer it will only take a few minutes to customize the official installer. To support AHCI you can use my custom oem.tgz.

After the installation the hard drive may not yet be available since the wrong configuration is loaded during boot. To override the configuration the following additional steps have to be taken:

  1. Use vSphere client to login to the ESXi 5.0 server, enable SSH access & connect to it.
  2. Manually load the AHCI driver with the command:
    "vmkload_mod /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/ahci"
  3. In the subfolders of the /vmfs/volumes folder locate the boot.cfg files (there may be several).
  4. Modify those boot.cfg files and change the order when the OEM-00.t00 module is loaded, placing it directly before imgdb.tgz.
  5. Reboot the host system.

Notes:
• Make sure to change the SATA Mode to AHCI in the BIOS.
• ESXi 5.0 requires at least 2GB of memory. For the ASRock ION 330 system this means that reducing the amount of shared video memory does not help anymore. Instead you will have to upgrade the memory to > 2GB.

Tags: NVIDIA MCP79, ASRock ION 330, VMware ESXi 5.0

Cyrill (Sep 18, 2011)

Comments

Hello i have ASUS P5N7A-VM on nforce 9300 (MCP79) I make cd - thanks for your instruction and driver, i install esxi successful but when i try to creat datastore (sata hdd connected on MCP79 AHCI -SATA) - esxi not see HDD ;( What wrong ? Thanks for advice

Sunday 02 October 2011 - 22:46 von Neo (Guest)

I have added a short description how to change the order of the loaded modules such that the customized driver configuration is properly loaded during boot.

Monday 03 October 2011 - 23:34 von bcyrill

thanks for this post. It allowed me to get ESXI up and running with relative ease.

Wednesday 02 November 2011 - 02:45 von Steven (Guest)

Hello, thank you for your description and the functional oem.tgz. but one problem i have actually. after every reboot i have to load the ahci module manually. i looked in the boot.cfg files and saw that oem-00.t00 will be loaded before imgdb.tgz. i looked with the vi and its seems to be correct. do you have some ideas ? thanks a lot and regards Karsten

Wednesday 18 January 2012 - 17:37 von esxi user (Guest)

@Karsten: The OEM-00.t00 module has to be loaded after the original driver such as _directly_ before imgdb.tgz.

Friday 20 January 2012 - 18:41 von bcyrill

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