Installation guide

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RAID controllers – Dell PERC (Adaptec RAID or LSI MegaRAID), HP Smart Array RAID, or IBM
(Adaptec) ServeRAID controllers.
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SCSI disk or a local (non-network) RAID LUN with unpartitioned space for the virtual machines.
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For Serial ATA (SATA), a disk connected through supported SAS controllers or supported on-board SATA
controllers.
NOTE You cannot connect a SATA CD-ROM device to a virtual machine on an ESXi 4.1 host. To use the
SATA CD-ROM device, you must use IDE emulation mode.
ESXi 4.1 Installable supports installing on and booting from the following storage systems:
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SATA disk drives – SATA disk drives connected behind supported SAS controllers or supported on-board
SATA controllers.
Supported SAS controllers include:
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LSI1068E (LSISAS3442E)
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LSI1068 (SAS 5)
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IBM ServeRAID 8K SAS controller
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Smart Array P400/256 controller
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Dell PERC 5.0.1 controller
Supported on-board SATA include:
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Intel ICH9
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NVIDIA MCP55
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ServerWorks HT1000
NOTE ESX does not support using local, internal SATA drives on the host server to create VMFS datastores
that are shared across multiple ESX hosts.
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Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives – Supported for installing ESXi 4.1 and for storing virtual machines
on VMFS partitions.
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Fibre Channel or iSCSI
Recommendation for Enhanced ESXi Performance
To enhance performance, VMware recommends that you install ESXi on a robust system with more RAM than
the minimum required and with multiple physical disks.
Consider the following recommendations for enhanced performance:
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RAM – ESXi 4.1 hosts require more RAM than typical servers. An ESXi 4.1 host must be equipped with
sufficient RAM to run concurrent virtual machines.
For example, operating four virtual machines with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Windows XP requires at
least 3GB of RAM for baseline performance. This includes approximately 1024MB for the virtual machines
(256MB minimum for each operating system as recommended by vendors).
Running these four virtual machines with 512MB RAM requires that the ESXi 4.1 host be equipped with
approximately 4GB RAM, which includes 2048MB for the virtual machines.
These calculations do not take into account possible memory savings from using variable overhead
memory for each virtual machine. See the Resource Management Guide.
vSphere Upgrade Guide
14 VMware, Inc.