ESXi on Asrock Z97 Extreme6

Those looking to install ESXi 5.5u2 on Asrock’s Z97 Extreme6 motherboard, fear not. Although Vmware has a very strict hardware compatibility list, the amount of community drivers almost exceeds the default shipped ones.

Preparation

Before the installation process, I only slipstreamed three drivers (packaged as .vib files) into my ESXi ISO, two for the different 10/100/1000 network controllers (an Intel I218v and a Realtek RTL811GR) and one for the SATA drivers. Onboard are ten SATA ports, six of which are provided by the Intel Z97 chipset and four by a seperate Asmedia ASM1061 controller.

• Realtek r8168 and r8111e
• Realtek r8169
• Intel I218v (download links at the bottom)
• SATA-xahci

To combine these into one ESXi ISO, I used the following steps (thanks to here):

1. Download ESXi 5 Community Tools Pack
2. Put all the aforementioned drivers in a separate folder
3. Run vib2zip.cmd from the community tools pack to create a zip file of all the drivers in the folder.
4. Download ESXi Customizer 
5. Select your ESXi ISO
6. Select the zip file created in step 3
7. Select an output directory
8. Run

This should create a new ISO (esxi-whitebox) that includes your drivers. This ISO can be written to a USB stick, for example through the excellent RUFUS tool.

Installation

Since I’d like to install ESXi on a USB stick (it loads itself into RAM anyway), we need one more empty stick (minimum 8GB, recommended 16GB) to act as a boot device.

Insert the two sticks into your new homelab server and boot from USB (well, the ESXi one). Since an UEFI bios often does not like the GPT partition layout that ESXi creates, we’ll format with MBR. For this, when the installation is starting, press shift-O when prompted. After runweasel, type formatwithmbr and press enter. The installation will proceed as normal.

Choose an install location (the other USB stick in this case) and proceed as normal. After the installation, ESXi will boot and give you a management  IP address on which you can connect on your Vsphere Client, but more on that later.

The beginnings

Intrigued by virtualization and jealous of all the sweet setups on /r/homelab I started building my own homelab. Small beginnings, big aspirations.

Not wanting to spend an arm and a leg on power bills I didn’t opt for a second hand Dell R620 on eBay but instead started building my own, a whitebox.

At the heart of my server I opted for a midrange i5 4460. Primary considerations here were a low-ish TDP (84 Watt), ability to underclock/undervolt (for a bit powersavings) and VT-x and VT-d support.

VT-x is hardware virtualization support, a basic requirement (it’ll work without, but you don’t want that) and VT-d is virtualization technology for directed I/O, a system where you can assign a hardware device (such as a RAID controller or a graphics card) to a virtual machine.

As a motherboard I went with an Asrock Z97 Extreme6, mostly because of the dual NIC and vendor availability in my area (I don’t like waiting). Together with the CPU, this board supports 32 gigabytes of DDR3 memory in it’s four ram slots. Although it is probably overkill, the 10 SATA3 ports will surely come in handy one day.

Not wanting to open my wallet that far, I also settled (for now) for 16 gigabytes of Crucial Ballistix Sport (DDR3-1600). Power comes from a Corsair CX430M modular PSU. I needed around 180 watts in total for my setup, which leaves me with 230 watts to grow. Not needing to drive a big SLI or CrossFire setup really brings down the power.

I only bought one hard drive – a Western Digital Red 1TB – because I still have some other lying around at home.

Homelab in a Fractal Design R4 case.

All of this is contained in a Fractal Design R4 case, which is not exactly the smallest case. In fact, my initial plans revolved around the mini-itx formfactor. I chose this one because of the excellent noise isolation, the looks and the price/quality.

Next post will describe the installation of my hypervisor of choice, VMWare ESXi and my journey into the world of community drivers and offline bundles.