Installing ESXi on a Dell PowerEdge server with IDE drives

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ESXi is a powerful virtualization hypervisor which is available for free from the VMWasre website. What’s great is it will run on just about any server hardware, and pretty much any workstation for that matter. With some advanced features from the paid-for releases, you can live migrate between virtual servers in the event of a failure. What this means is that you can use non-redundant hardware to virtualize on since it can fail over to another server.

However, one of the non-redundant configurations ESXi does not support is IDE drives in a non-RAID configuration. Fortunately you can configure ESXi to install on IDE drives, but you effectively trick it into believe the drive is a SCSI drive.

The installation instructions can be found on the following website, but be aware that this is an unsupported configuration and support from VMWare may be very limited.

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_install_to_IDE_drive/ESXi_install_to_IDE_drive.php

Enjoy!