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>
>There is something in ESX that lists which types of drivers are valid
>for use as installation drives...i don't know where this is.
>

You are correct and I was working on the same assumption because I could patently see that my two sata disks were being detected by the vmkernel fine and every utility that I could find in the ESXi install environment could actually make use of the storage on my disks. E.g. fdisk

I hence spent a lot of time trying out different things.

Firstly, I tried to be clever and created a python script, roughly 7 lines which used the /usr/lib/vmware/installer/Core/DD.py and other handy scripts in the installer(/usr/lib/vmware/installer/Core) folder, in the install environment, to dd the bzip2'ed image(VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.dd.bz2) onto my disk directly.

Doing this resulted in the various partitions in the image being laid out on my disk and I thought that if I rebooted, this should boot me into the main esx installation. Nope! Didn't work! The ESXi installer must be doing some more stuff to make a bootable install. (maybe it added a mbr or something like that)

So I started looking at the python scripts in detail. Trying to follow the various stages of installation and came across one script which looked like it was determining the interface type of the devices detected.

The /usr/lib/vmware/installer/Core/TargetFilter.py script has a function which returns True if the specified lun is an IDE Lun. I changed the function as follows:

-----------------Original-----------------
def IDEFilter(lun):
"""IDEFilter(lun)
Returns True if the specified lun is an IDE Lun, False otherwise."""
interface = __GetSCSIInterface(lun)

if not interface:
return False

return interface.GetInterfaceType() == ScsiInterface.SCSI_IFACE_TYPE_IDE
-----------------Original-----------------
-----------------Modified-----------------
def IDEFilter(lun):
"""IDEFilter(lun)
Returns True if the specified lun is an IDE Lun, False otherwise."""
interface = __GetSCSIInterface(lun)

if not interface:
return False

#return interface.GetInterfaceType() == ScsiInterface.SCSI_IFACE_TYPE_IDE
return interface.GetInterfaceType() == ScsiInterface.SCSI_IFACE_TYPE_ISCSI
-----------------Modified-----------------

after saving the file, I re-ran the installer (type in: install) and it worked!!! :-) I was able to see both my SATA disks and install ESXi without any issues.

I've just been testing out my ESXi install right now to ensure that I don't have any compatibilty issues and I can confirm that my install is stable!

I can see the possible problems of doing this, the installer will treat ALL ide devices(cdroms/hdds etc) as SCSI devices but doing this was my ONLY way of getting ESXi installed. I had tried changing the BIOS configuration as you suggested and trying different combination of PCI ids but none of it worked.

Anyway, by posting to your blog I hope someone else will pick up the above information and confirm whether it worked for them or not.

-Jinesh

after some more digging, i had to backburner this for a while, i figured out that the problem i'm having has to do with the fact that the DM-2 is not an e1000 card but rather an e1000e, which is not included with the ESXi distro.

i've been struggling with getting the e1000e driver, in fact all of the VMWare ESXi code, to compile under RedHat 7.2 and gcc 3 - with very little luck so far - so i can repackage and redeploy.

i think this will be the solution to the problem, but i just have to figure out why VMWare's makefiles and build scripts don't want to compile on my system.

Rebuilding the oem.tgz file according to your instructions worked. I can now boot VMare ESXi on my Compaq 6710b from my USB stick AND it recognizes the internal SATA harddisk for storage. Created my first virtual appliance as a test and everything seems to run fine. It does not yet see the internal CD-ROM drive on the host however, but I'll tackle that problem another time.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge in your blog and the assistance!