Drivers for VMware ESXi 4.1 or The Tale of Feeding the Red Pill to Recalcitrant Neo?

Question

VMware

Good afternoon, hackers!

Once upon a time there was a server on the Intel S5000PSL motherboard and two Xeons with hardware support for virtualization. A census of this population revealed an LSI 1064e hardware SAS RAID controller. Without hesitation, we assembled an array of 4 disks in RAID 5 and properly initialized it.

While the hard drives were spinning up in anticipation of formatting, the original iso image of VMware ESXi 4.1 was downloaded under the license for vSphere 4 Essentials Plus from vmware.com. The

boot disk was successfully burned and we proceeded to install the overseas beast.
After accepting the license agreement, the installer seditiously declared that he did not know where to install and that everything went to the forest in general, press the only Reboot button.

To check on the test subject through PXE, SYSRESCD was launched, which partially confirmed the words of vmware - there is a controller, but there are no partitions on it. In contrast, the previously sacrificed Windows Server 2003 worked quite successfully on the supposedly missing RAID array.

We were about to be sad, but just in time we remembered the Intel website. From there, from unknown American lands, an archive of drivers for ESXi 4.1 was downloaded, containing a 450kb iso disk image.
The disk with the drivers was successfully burned, but the fairy tale ends here, because we do not know how to feed them to the fastidious VMware ESXi 4.1 installer. Unfortunately, during the installation process, the installer does not hint in any way about a possible bait by third-party RAID drivers.

Please help us complete the story successfully.

Answer 1

Create a custom ESXi image for your RAID Driver - 3ware RAID driver integration example. Judging by the tale, you are a person with straight arms, you will figure out how to do it by analogy, it’s not difficult there. If you have difficulty with English, please contact us and we will translate it.

Answer 2

You have fake-raid there, apparently.
Unfortunately, I can’t help with the “slip the driver” account.

Answer 3

The simplest thing is to put ESX on a disk outside the raid, after which you can slip the drivers already installed so that it sees the main partition for storing virtual machines.

Answer 4

You are "lucky", most likely your ESRTII RAID (onboard 1064e) is not supported. Pushing drivers won't help.

Answer 5

on one of the 4.1 we did not see any screws larger than a terabyte at all.