For a project I currently work on we had to create a mobile rack with ESXi hosts. After some research I found that the SuperMicro E200-8D are actually a good choice for the case. They have 4 NICs (2 x 1GBe + 2 x 10GBe) plus a seperate ILO and support NVMe and SSD as a parallel disk option. If you choose these servers you need to be aware that the necessary intel drivers for the NICs do not come with the VMware base image. You need to download and install them.
The downloads for different systems can be found in the VMware HCL.
- Download the appropriate package from the VMware Homepage
- Expand the file
- Copy the VIB file to one of your ESXi local disks if you have them. In my case I put it on my Capacity SSD drive named esx-adm-01-n01-localCapacity.
- Run the following command (replace file and folder name)
- esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/esxi-adm-01-N01-localCapacity/VIBs/net-ixgbe_4.5.3-1OEM.600.0.0.249585.vib
reboot - Wait for the system to return back online and the NICs should be available.
Once time allows I will also post more details on my use and configuration for the E200 demo setup.
