Any know issues with Intel H61 boards and ESXi

[RimBlock]

Hi,

I am building a miniITX ESXi 5 machine and the only intel board I can source locally is Intel H61 miniITX unit (BOXDH61DLB3). I specifically want an intel board as the network card should be supported being based on an intel chipset.

Does anyone know of any incompatibilities with ESXi with this board or the H61 chipset in general please ?.

Many thanks
RB

 

[RimBlock]

At a guess, most common problem you'll find is an unsupported storage controller. Check that and the rest will be fine i reckon.

Good point,

Luckily the board handles the SATA interfaces through the H61 chipset rather than using off-chip solutions.

Thanks for highlighting so I could check though.

RB

 

[RimBlock]

Hi,

I completed my build and did encounter an issue going the mTIX route. Almost no mITX LGA1155 boards of any chipset have an inbuilt lan chipset supported natively by ESXi. Shockingly, the Intel lan chipsets that are specifically designed with virtulization features and were released at the beginning of this year do not work with ESXi as ESXi is using a very old set of drivers. ESXi does not list support for any Realtek lan chipsets at all.

With the H61 Intel board I had to add a PCIe x1 Intel CT network adapter which has a ESXi supported chipset on it. The build is complete and has now gone off to the client. I have put pics up in the SFF forum here.

The second and much better build will be based around the Intel S1200KP mITX c206 chipset motherboard which supports i3 and E3 Xeon processors. As E3 chips start around the same price as an i5-2500, for ESXi it seems like a perfect choice. The board also has dual lan and one of the chipsets is the same as the one in the CT network adapter. Local pricing for the board where I am is around 120 quid. I should be getting a unit next week to do the build with and will post up pics of that one as well.

RB