Lots of people contacted me lately about my previous article about my Poweredge T105 running VMware ESXi. Most of them were concerned about the system being able to run ESXi properly. It seems that a lot of people have posted items on their Blog or in a Forum about the difficulties they experienced running ESX on a Poweredge T105.
Am I lucky? I’m not sure, the one thing I do know is that I have it running for a couple of months now.
An issue I can confirm is that you have to have a certain buildnumber (or above) to get it running, i.e. one of the earlier versions of ESXi did not run properly as stated in one of my earlier posts. When the T105 came to the market the version of ESXi available at that time, did not recognize most of the hardware that’s inside the T105 (broadcom nic, SATA controller etc.).
The version of ESXi(3.5.0 build-110271) I use does not have any difficulties of whatsoever. The PowerEdge T105 runs ESXi from a USB-stick plugged in onto the motherboard inside the case. It’s just plug and play, no additional drivers were used. To give you an idea of how it looks like (and proof of operation) I made some screenshots I’d like to share with you.
Looking into the future I think more and more hardware is able to run ESX(i), that’s logical if you look at the strategy Vmware has developed in the client corner of IT. Vmware’s currently developing a client hypervisor as part of the VDI/Desktop strategy and looking at the different hardware vendors producing laptop/client hardware the support for other hardware in that hypervisor which probably is based on ESXi (just guessing here) must be broadened. It’s most likely that you can run your ESXi hypervisor on nearly any piece of hardware in the near future.
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