Running VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0 on the HP Proliant Microserver

Those of you that have bought an HP Proliant Microserver for your work or home VMware vSphere lab are probably wondering whether it will work with VMware vSphere 5.0?  Well, the good news is that it does and that even the installation  process goes through without a hitch both to local internal USB pen drive or local disk.  I have tested this with the final RTM version of vSphere ESXi 5.0, not just the beta builds, and can confirm that the CPU, storage controller, memory and network card are detected without a problem meaning that you’re all set to go for when VMware make available the VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0 download available sometime soon. 

With the free downloadable version of ESXi 5.0 the amount of physical memory accessible in the host has been reduced to 8GB so this combined with the fact that the HP Microserver can only take 8GB anyway won’t leave you feeling like you’ve wasted your money on adding extra memory.  Those of you, like myself, that also have an HP Proliant ML110 G6 with 16GB will either have to look at only using 8GB of it’s memory, keep installing the eval license on a regular basis (too much hassle) or purchasing an entry level vSphere license to allow me to access the full 16GB of memory in the server.  Either way, the new exciting features (see my post here for more details) found in VMware vSphere 5.0 is too much of a temptation to leave my vSphere lab servers at vSphere 4.1.