A customer was kind enough to let me play mad scientist with one of his servers today, and I learned the following:

The HP Proliant DL320 G3 is (mostly) compatible with ESXi.

What I mean by “mostly” is that while ESXi will recognize and use the hard disks, it doesn’t really like the ICH6R RAID controller.

• When you disable the RAID controller in the BIOS, and put two disks in the server, ESXi will see two disks.
• When you enable the RAID controller, and create a RAID1 mirror from two disks, ESXi will see two disks.
• If you load ESXi on one of the two disks it see when when they are mirrored, it will fail to boot.

So, your best bet is to turn off RAID, and use software mirroring if you want fault tolerance.

ESXi will detect and use the network interfaces (HP NC7782).

This server is 32-bit so your OS options are limited.

I also discovered by experimentation that this server will recognize a 1TB SATA disk, so that’s useful.

Tags: compatibility, ESXi, Proliant DL320 G3