In my last blog I explained how and why I ended up with the hardware I have. Here’s how I made it work.<\/p>\n
So ESXI is nice and simple to install onto a USB drive, especially when you have Supermicro’s iKVM with remote media mounting. Stick the USB stick into the mobo, log into the iKVM, mount the ESXI installer iso as a remote CD and boot from it. Simple. Really, it “just works”. Reboot, unmount the remote media and boot from the USB. All without having to actually move from the keyboard, except the initial plugging in.<\/p>\n
Initially I wanted to make sure things would work before I bought the NVMe M.2 SSD, so I used the unused space on the boot USB for my datastore. Its pretty easy to do, you can find how on the internet, but I’m not going to tell how you ‘cos its a terrible idea and it caused ESXI to crash, a lot. It did show me that ESXI would work though, so I bought the SSD.<\/p>\n
The first issue with ESXI (I’m using 6.5 here) is that it does not want to let you pass through the C610 SATA controller. It makes sense I guess, ESXI wants it for using with data stores. But I have the NVMe for that, so how can we pass the SATA through? Well, this chap knows http:\/\/www.kaperschip.nl\/2016\/08\/ahci-controller-passthrough-with.html<\/a> so thats easy.<\/p>\n