Dell C6100 and ESXi 5.5

tstrip007

Running into issues getting 5.5 on this Dell C6100 (Quad Node) server. Looking at the HCL I see that the last supported version is 5.1 U3.

I have 5.5 on all 4 hosts now and the problem I am running into is the mgt agents getting hung or something. vCenter is losing access to them and when I go to the DCUI I am not able to pull up the custimize options to restart them, just have to cold shutdown and reboot. The fact that it keeps happening is wanting me to downgrade to the last supported release at 5.1 U3. I do have dell's customed image loaded. Guess my questions are...

1. Anyone successfully running the C6100 on 5.5? If so, did you run into these problems? (Google hasnt been much help)

2. Do you consider it an extreme "no no" to run a version ESXi image NOT supported by VMware

Apprecaite any feedback

JBrown

I used to run un-supported hardware all the time. the networking was always the most major issue, at least as I experienced it. Do you have an Intel NIC card that you could drop into one of the nodes, and test the management network that way ?

jibbajabba

When booting hit Alt-F12, that should display the vmkernel logs. Maybe you can see where the box hangs. For example, if you use ISCSI and it hangs in mounting the LUNs (which can crash the agent too), you may just have to buy a NIC which is on the HCL.

In fact, storage and network are probably the main issues when running unsupported hardware.

Once I had to swap NIC and ditch local storage for USB boot and remote storage to get it working.

Using unsupported hardware is an extreme no no if you need ..... support So if you want to be able to call VMWare, don't use it, if you don't, do what you want