Thursday, July 29, 2010

Mother Board replacement and ESXi

One of my clients on the west coast is considering replacing the motherboard in one of their ESXi servers with a much faster one and asked the question "Will ESXi still boot and function properly?". This is a standalone ESXi server. The existing motherboard has an older Core 2 Duo and the new one has an i7.

Well the short answer is "probably not, without some work".
Probably better in a larger environment to use a host profile, rebuild the host after the motherboard upgrade, then restore the profile.

The client chose the motherboard ad had a local computer shop do the swap. Once the motherboard was replaced, ESXi came up but had no network. A little investigation showed that the replacement motherboard (Asus P6T) has an unsupported network card. I recommended that the client buy a Intel Pro 1000 Desktop card. Once installed, ESXi recognized the card and a little console configuration brought the host back to life. More details later.



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