Picture(s) will follow, but not much to see than some ugly cabling.....
Parts arrived yesterday. After getting back home from the office, having dinner and doing some other stuff I started to build around 8:30 pm. At midnight FreeBSD booted as guest under ESXi.
Some stuff I bumped into:
P7F-E bios set to boot from USB to install ESXi failed, it only booted from harddisk which had a old FreeBSD install. After mucking around I disabled the OEM Logo Boot screen to see the POST messages and saw a message to press F8 for the BSS menu. BSS?????, well I pressed the F8 during boot and got to options: drive name of my hardisk and something refering to what looked like the memstick....choose the mem stick and a few moments later the ESXi Installer was running. BSS=Boot Sector/System Selector???
Boot ESXi and it takes very long (1 to 2 minutes) to load the IPMI module. Probably because I have not installed the BMC daughterboard ASUS offers for the PF7-E. I found some hints at how to disable loading the IPMI module but the change in the 72.IPMI file did not survive the reboot, it was back at the original after booting. Was able to find 72.IPMI but not before I found how to login at the service console under ALT-F1. (I'm a total ESXI green-horn). For 72.IPMI I found another reference to make the file sticky with a CHMOD so it survives a boot (I suspect these files are in a memory drive and get reloaded at boot from the image.) Gonna try the sticky bit tonight. If that does not work I'll dig into ddimage.bz2 on the install mem stick and alter it there. Hopefully the MD5 check will only nag and not abort at install.
I'm using iMac/OSX so to use vSphere client I had to fireup my Win-XP under paralells. After making a VM and installing FreeBSD into it I ran into some conflict with the mouse when opening the console. Normally mouse focus under Parallels is very gracefully in use, no need to release the mouse from a window via the keyboard. But when I start the console in vSphere client I loose the mouse. ALT-CNTRL releases it, but it is paralells that catches the keyboard and I still cant operate the vSphere client anymore. Vmware uses the same ALT-CNTRL to release the mouse from the console. Google is your friend. Someone had the same issue and knew that VMware uses the same ALT-CNTRL to release the mouse. The solution (but not yet tested myself) is to alter the key sequence in Paralells to something else.
Todo:
Today a LSI 3081 card will arrive: I'll have to decide how to use it: let the card do the raid and install all on it including ESXi and have the FreeBSD reside within the VMFS and use the plain FreeBSD UFS fs or use it in passthrough and let FreeBSD have it for it's own and use the hardware raid or reflash it ti IT mode and use ZFS and keep VMware + datastore/inventory on a disk connected to the ICH10. The first FreeBSD VM will be the fileserver and provide that to other VM's and the other computer at home. Some testing will be done the upcoming weekend, at the moment I favor the passthrough mode with the LSI as 8 port HBA and have FreeBSD do it thing with ZFS.....
Also have to figure out how I can shutdown all VM's (and ESXi itself) gracefully when the UPS tells the system to do so, FreeBSD and the APC UPS can communicate.....found some stuff that FreeBSD (or other *nix) can propagate that to ESXi via a SOAP call.
