October 14th, 2009 
Kiwi Si 
Those of you who use HP’s Proliant range of servers who have recently gone (ie: since the launch of vSphere) to download the VMware ESXi ISO from VMware’s site will have found that it is no longer available. Both the Dell and IBM customised binaries are still available for download but what has happened to HP’s?
The good news is that the HP Customised ESXi binary (ISO) which contains the latest HP CIM (Common Information Model) providers is still available for download but you must now venture over to HP’s website here.
Why?
I’m not sure of the reasons why HP has moved this customised ESXi download from VMware’s site as it would make most sense to have it located at both sites (ie: HP and VMware) considering the little work it’d take to ensure that the latest builds are in sync at both places versus the confusion this change will cause to customers.
Anyway, I hope this helps clears up any such confusion for anyone trying to track down the latest VMware ESXi HP build.
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My name is Simon Seagrave and I am a London (UK) based Senior Technology Consultant and vSpecialist working for EMC. 
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I tried using the custom HP version on my ML115 G5 last night using the well documented procedure to put the dd image on a USB stick. Boots up fine but about two minutes after the boot sequence completes I get the PSOD.
I then repeated the procedure with the Generic ESXi 4 image and it works fine. I looked at the Hardware Heath tab and I can see component health, fan speeds, temps, etc. I don’t have a LOM card in this particular system.
What am I missing out on by not using the HP image? Is it just the HP SIM agents?
-Pete
[Reply]
jamesp Reply:
October 15th, 2009 at 10:06 am
I’d be interested to know what BIOS version and ESX build you have, as I don’t see any health status on mine.
HP build doesn’t generally work because the server lacks the management hardware needed by the CIM agents, but there is a work-around to use it to get the E200 status at
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/233617
[Reply]
BIOS is 018 2008-05-26
BMC Firmware is 46:10000 3.11
The HP ESXi build is 164009. The generic VMware build I installed was 171294 but it was immediately patched up to 193498, I didn’t notice if the health status was presented before I patched it.
-Pete
[Reply]
James Pearce Reply:
October 16th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
That’s odd, I have same BIOS and build but don’t see any health. ESX doesn’t list the BMC, perhaps that is the issue (I do have “tg3 device firmware 5722-v3.07″?).
[Reply]
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