Installing VMWare ESX 3i (3.5.0) on a Hewlet Packard Proliant DL160 G5 could cause problems. It could hang at some stage where it says Enabling interrupts. This is because by default ACPI is enabled and causes problems.
To disable ACPI when booting the ESX CD, hit Tab at the CD boot screen and insert after the vmkernel.gz the following:
Leave the rest of the line intact and hit Enter to boot the machine. The installation should continue flawlessly. However, the installed version of ESX still has ACPI still enabled. Boot the machine with a preferably Linux Live CD and mount the second partition (/dev/sda5). Edit the boot.cfg file by changing the kernelopt= line to:
Unmount the partition and reboot the machine. ESX should start now.
Update 21 August 2008
But you're not done yet. When ESX has started, connect the VMWare Infrastructure Client to it and go to the host configuration (tab Configuration). Click Advanced Settings->VMkernel->Boot. Uncheck the option VMkernel.Boot.ACPI, most probably at the top of the whole list. That should teach ESX for real.
Update 2 September 2008
I gave up with installing ESX on this server. It boots fine and it seems you can work with it like any other installation. Except, the disk throughput is unacceptably low. Running the command:
took over 4 minutes (about 2.2 MB/sec). No matter if this was on a guest machine or on the host itself (in the unsupported mode). This machine can do much better, of course, as proven with executing this command from a Linux live CD. So something goes horribly wrong in ESX, and I didn't have the time to find out the reason of this low throughput.
CD/DVD attachment also does not work....
I also hit the disk performance issues. Unable to get around them.
The other issue was that I was unable to get the connected CD/DVD drive to recognise. I believe that this is due to the ACPI being forced off. Moral of the story? Buy from the HCL.
Great post, helped me enormously.
DL160 HDD Performance
I used RAID 1 - 2x250GB SATA Drives. I got the same 2.2 MB performance using the dd command, but when I see VMWARE console it consistently hits 6.5MB write speed and signigifantly higher (30-40MB) read speeds.
Can you post what write speeds you see otherwise so that I can figure how badly off I am with 6.5MBPS. Also on the same server using E200 Cards and RAID 5 with 4x250GB SATA drives I get 19MB sustained write speeds using ESXi 3.5
Unfortunately I cannot test
Unfortunately I cannot test it anymore, the server in question has gone into production (without ESX).