August 8, 200817 yr I know people have gotten unraid working under vmware workstation, but run into the 4 disk issue. Now that ESXi is free, I'm wondering how that would work. Boot ESXi, use a small VMFS volume to host RDM's that point to physical disks in the system for UNRAID to use. I'm not exactly sure what the limit of disks are for ESX, but I know I can add at least 6 vmdk's in ESX3.5, I'm assuming RDM disks are the same (looks like there's at least 20 SCSI addresses in the options. I don't see why it wouldn't work, I don't think ESXi allows USB pass through, so that might be a problem but solvable. I've never used ESXi, I know they've stripped some functionality, but not sure of the top of my head. The only real issues I see with doing this is whether ESX will allow regular SATA/IDE controllers to host RDM's. There are issues with ESX support on SATA/IDE controllers hosting VMFS volumes, but there are a few hacks I believe you can do to get it to work. Also a lot of Sata raid cards work. If I can get some time maybe I'll give it a try.
August 8, 200817 yr From what I'm seeing they only certify certain hardware. In one of the PDF's it stated that certain XEON processors were not supported unless a footnote was supplied. I can't seem to find anything that says what the basic minimum requirements are. In any case, ESXi is an exciting possibility.
August 8, 200817 yr but to restrict any Xeon seems a little strict. I didn't see where the restricted it, just said certain familes, (5100, 7100 )not supported unless footnoted. This sort of baffled me. I did not see anywhere where basic duo core 2's were supported. So in some case, I'm not sure how useful ESXi really is, other then a small footprint for certified machines.
August 15, 200817 yr The only problem is the USB stick, it's absolutely needed for the license key right? Yes, It is needed to lock the license key to the device.
October 20, 200916 yr usb is supported in ESX 4.0, however its broken. Update 1 is rumored to have the fix and should allow usb devices on the host connect to the guest OS. I'm waiting on this myself as installing vmware server on unraid is way more Linux than i want to be involved in.
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