VMware ESXi 5.1 on ASRock ION 330
VMware ESXi 5.1 has recently been released. Since the NVIDIA MCP79 chipset is not officially supported one has to create a custom installer to install / upgrade ESXi 5.1 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 sata-ahci-mcp79-5.1.0-1.x86_64.vib which contains the ahci driver and the PCI device IDs for the MCP79 chipset.
Notes:
• Make sure to change the SATA Mode to AHCI in the BIOS.
• ESXi 5.x 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.
Cyrill (Oct 18, 2012)