hello guys, i wanted to share my experience with esxi 7.0.3 .
i had a boot drive with esxi containing my VMs as well, on a x370 and ryzen 3600 cpu.
you may as well noticed that x370 and ryzen are both loaded with stability issues here and there. and this caught me again and again. my server died and it sims either my board toasted my 3600 or it died it self as well( i once lost 1700x on this board).
so i changed my server with z440 HP but esxi refused to work and always stayed that it expected partner drives but it has community drives!
this issue was solved with turn of the secure boot. reinstall the same version of esxi as update also can solve this issue on each hardware you change ( it appear to solve drive signatures on boot) but now my esxi show that there is no compatible NICs on device.
i digged alot into this problem and found that my NIC pci device is there but the drive is not loaded , and it may also has been stock as passthrough. so i tried alot of commands with many thanks to chatgpt with no avail.
so i got my self a p1000 intel nic and it worked. then i also realized that community drivers for nics are not installed correctly.
so i changed the acceptance level of my esxi from partner to community and updated my esxi with same image containing community flings and nics and all.
this time the main NIC driver is working and its not grayed out. but its stock at passthrough ( with reboot it still stock as passthough). but i prefer to stay on this install for longer.
any way, my take aways are these:
- do not turn on the secure boot or clear it when you transfer esxi boot drive.
- broadcom has destroyed esxi for community by deleting the forum and content about esxi. stay away from esxi for homeserver, go for proxmox or anything with better community support. making esxi iso is pain in your gut.
- if you mess with disableACS option in esxi to passthrough your gpu, beware that this could make problems with passthrough.
- use chatgpt to work with esxi shell, but it might not help you!
- turn acceptance level of esxi to community ASAP. before you get in to trouble.
- always expect to install new esxi on new hardware so have a proper backup with veeam.
- ryzen platform is not good solution for homelab! my platinum PSU couldn’t handle heat and i needed to put it outside of the case!! and my x370 board was always party pooping!
if you have any solution for my NIC stock with passthrough please tell.
thanks guys.