First things first.... a BIG ol middle finger to the bios/board engineers that made whatever decisions were made that hamstringed this ridiculously expensive board. Yeah.
I retired my primary gaming PC last week. This MB being the platform it was run on. Seems like an ESXi host is natural use for a LGA 1366 system with 24GB of ram. Only, due to some limited foresight on EVGA's part, this board is all but unsuitable for it. Headache after headache after headache later, I have a running ESXi system on it. Since I know I'm not the only one that wants this working, this is how I did it.
To begin with, ESXi 5.x and up just won't work. There is no combination of bios versions, settings, GPUs, custom ISOs, install methods or whatever that will work. I spent about 4 days on that. SMH... Somehow, this x58 board doesn't allocate video memory in a way that handles ESXi's display mode changes. I bought an ancient ATI Rage XL 8MB GPU, because that is the bottom line fallback GPU that will work in almost any instance. ESXi 5.x+ looks for 8MB of video ram to allocate and if for any reason it can't do that, the install will hang on relocating kernel modules, or something like that. Using larger cards with even GBs of ram doesn't work. I even tried an old Voodoo Banshee card I have -- nothing works. No, IgnoreHeadless=TRUE does not work in this case either. There is simply some problem with EVGA's BIOS implementation that dickblocks this. It works fine on MSI and Gigabyte x58's, but those are still running ~$200 on ebay (really?).
Moreover, our x58 motherboards don't handle GPT partitions well at all. It practically puked when I just hooked up an ESXi drive installed from another system using a GPT partition. This can be partially mitigated by using the 'formatwithmbr' install flag, but it didn't matter as even a working installation of ESXi won't move past the video mode change during boot. Insert expletives at EVGA here.
I did discover that ESXi 4.1 and earlier don't use video mode changes, and still use MBR formatting. The only downside is there is no native driver support for the RT8111D/8169 LAN chips, the ICH10R AHCI Sata controller, or the JMicron 362/3 Sata controller. I have a i350-T2, which does have support in 4.1, but have to revert to IDE mode to get 4.1 to install and run properly. Since IDE mode caps disk transfers at about 133MB/s, and I actually have an SSD to hold the VMs, I wanted better.
Queue more crappy EVGA x58 limitations: So, after bending over backwards and busting my balls to get ESXi to install AND boot (because often it would install, but not boot under AHCI) I eventually discovered that the board won't boot ESXi in AHCI mode from the SSD. The exact same installation done using a 2.5" Laptop drive works fine. I tried rewriting and upgrading the bootloader on the SSD, tried chainloading, considered using an EFI bootloading environment to boot strap ESXi, nothing worked. The SSD boots other OS/s fine, and boots ESXi fine in other machines. It was in fact my ESXi boot drive on older, less powerful hardware that ironically runs ESXi 5.5/6 just fine. Once again, EVGA's x58 shows how utterly impossible it is to work with.
Ultimately, accepting the limitations, I was able to get ESXi 4.1 installed. I had to customize the ISO by hand, the customizer available doesn't handle ESXi 4.1 ISOs very well and installing the Realtek/ICH10R drivers with it broke some other things. The end solution was to merge (working) RT8111/8169 & ICH10R AHCI drivers into the ISO by hand. This still breaks i350-T2 drivers. It's not a huge issue, because Vmware released updated 'async' drivers that needed to be installed later anyway. I just copied the offline bundle to the datastore and ran some commands that reinstalled driver. Once booted up, all 4 NICs are recognized, and the sata controller is listed as AHCI. Not too bad for like 60+ hours of work.
I should also point out that the ESXi 4.1 ISO is hard to come by, and a key for it even harder. VMware has discontinued support for it, and it doesn't appear anywhere under free accounts, free edition keys are no longer being given out, and VMware didn't respond to my request for a key. There are no keygens out there, and I was only able to get the ISOs from other people that had them on their FTP servers. Thanks random ESXi users. There are work arounds for keeping ESXi 4.1 working, but it requires rearming every 60 days which is...tedious. If anyone out there has a working key, I'd be super grateful.
If you're genuinely interested in repurposing your board for ESXi like I did, shoot me a PM and I can get you a copy of my customized ISO, bios settings, etc to get you going. As long as you are using a mechanical HDD plugged into ICH10R ports, it installs/boots fine.
This whole ordeal is like completing a stupidly complex maze with lots of dead ends. Over and over again, I'd make some small amount of progress only to run into another roadblock due to the damn board. These problems aren't present on the competing MBs from other manufacturers. I have no idea what the specific issue is surrounding the video modes and sata limitations, but shame on you EVGA. It's a flagship product. It doesn't *need* to be compatible with ESXi, but whatever you did to it broke it in a number of ways before BIOS development was just abandoned. This point wasn't lost on me when I was replacing my gaming platform, and it wasn't your board that got the sale.
Lastly, just point out other issues this board has, it crashes several times a day with an R9 290 card installed (weirdly not with 1 or 2 R9 280x installed though?), it crashes in certain games when using a PCI based Creative X-Fi, but not PCIe based X-Fi. The 83 bios doesn't seem to like to keep my ram frequency. Set it to 1600 using XMP, boots as 1066, set it to 1600 manually, boots at 1066. Disable Turbo, boots at 1600. Anyway, enough ranting for now. Mostly I just wanted to let others know ESXi is possible and give a basic outline on how to accomplish it, and I think I've done that. If any part of this helps you get yours going, please just drop a thanks in the topic. I poured an absurd amount of time into this solving the various issues to get it running.
post edited by rjohnson11 - 2015/07/18 00:53:25