Have been trying to get ESXi 3.5 (U3 or U4) installed on a HP ProLiant DL160 G5 with P400 storage controller. Read through this and some other information:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1186946 [communities.vmware.com]

Following changes made to the server:

• Enabled Intel Virtualization in the RBSU CPU setup
• Set the SATA HDD mode to AHCI

Installation is fine (using the HP Installable version of ESXi 3.5 U4), the server boots, stays up for around 2 minutes then PSOD’s with error type 14. Confirmed that ESXi is able to monitor the health of the storage controller (P400) and the disks which is a good start.

Reinstalled using the generic ESXi 3.5 U4 installable version, works perfect. Seems the HP management agents don’t play nice with certain components of the DL160 hardware (same story here [communities.vmware.com]). Without the HP agents, VI Client can no longer monitor the health of the P400 storage controller or the disks attached to it. Server can be added to HP SIM v5.03 and the hardware model and ESXi version are detected correctly as are the virtual machines running on the host.

So, it is for good reason that the DL160 is not on VMware’s HCL [vmare.com]