ESXi 6.0 has a fickle installer

This week I picked up a project that got put down last month, to install ESXi on one of my psuedo-servers. This particular machine runs an

ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS motherboard with an Intel Xeon processor. Normally, installing ESXi shouldn’t be that hard, unless your hardware isn’t on the HCL, in which case it can be quite fickle. That’s why this was the third time I’ve run headlong at a brickwall.

The particular error I was receiving was an obnoxiously vague message (aren’t they all), which follows:

Decompressed MD5: 00000000000000000000000000000000

Fatal Error: 10 (Out of Resources)

The only useful mention I could find online was on Elgwhoppo.com which discusses ESXi’s dislike of NVidia graphics cards. I was, in fact, running an passive NVidia unit — however the “MMCFG Base” solution didn’t work for me (didn’t have that option in my BIOS). Every option in the BIOS that I think might have an effect, I tried changing. No dice. I started swapping out and changing hardware, including changing the graphics card for a GTX 670 out of my gaming computer. Yes, it’s still NVidia (that’s all I have), but I had some hope it’d work — no dice.

Eventually I came up with the idea of body swapping and ended up with what you see pictured in the paragraph above. After 4 different donor hosts, I determined that my gaming machine would actually install ESXi (using a hard drive from my server), which is exactly what I did. While ESXi isn’t based on Unix/Linux exactly I hoped it was similar enough to Linux that it would take a bodyswap. After an install and swap, you can see from the image right that my guess was right. ESXi wouldn’t install on the Z9PE-D8 WS motherboard, but it would run just fine.

Let’s just hope I never have to re-install…