A few brief notes on the new VMware ESXi 5.0 release that are probably not covered elsewhere yet.
- My Asus P8H67-I mini-ITX board is fully supported in 5.0 (it was supported in 4.x as well)
- Realtek RTL8111E is supported out of the box. I have not yet tried it (I am using an Intel Pro/1000 PT Dual Port Server Adapter), but the onboard Realtek NIC shows up as a supported NIC: Realtek 8168 Gigabit Ethernet.
- Installing from USB is pretty easy. I used syslinux to get the USB bootable and used the UEFI image to launch the installer. I suspect that you do not even need the syslinux if you are booting from UEFI. I did a upgrade instead of a clean install and it worked flawlessly, although it complained a bit about two modifications (3ware 9xxx driver and a custom NIC driver).
- The vSphere 5.0 client is a lot faster in Windows 7 with Aero enabled. This was a major PITA in 4.1.
- Upgrading to VMFS 5 was just a matter of pressing a couple of buttons in the client. Smooth.
2 comments
Praavin says:
November 27, 2011 at 08:42 (UTC 2)
Hello,
Thanks for sharing information…
RTL8111E is really supported with ESXi 5?
I saw most of blog Intel 82579LM and 82579V on-board chips are not supported & they are common on all new Intel M/B
I am planning to setup Lab, Please guide.
Thanks,
Praavin
Edward says:
December 15, 2011 at 23:42 (UTC 2)
Hi,
I have a E350M1 (Asrock with AMD APU, 16GB), works like a charm with vSphere 5 Hypervisor. No local storage, booted from USB.
Cheers,
Edward