VMware vSphere 5 On Dell PowerEdge Systems Deployment Guide

Important information

• Dell recommends that you use the latest BIOS versions listed at Dell.com/support for Dell PowerEdge servers.
• Dell’s 13th generation of PowerEdge system supports ESXi installation on Non-RAID Logical unit number (LUN) or passthrough Hard disk drive (HDDs) or Solid state disk (SSDs).
• Dell’s 13th generation of PowerEdge system supports ESXi installation on an On-board SATA controller in Non-RAID mode.
• On Dell’s 12th generation of PowerEdge systems having Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor series, with ESXi 5.0 and later updates, Dell recommends to upgrade BIOS version 1.2.6 or later.

  NOTE: BIOS version 1.2.6 contains a critical fix for the issue, which can result in a Purple Screen.

• With the introduction of vSphere v5.1, vRAM licensing and entitlement requirements have been removed, along with core or memory counts. The only licensing consideration for vSphere is per physical socket.
• Dell PowerEdge systems shipped with BCM 5709 LOMs (with iSCSI offload enabled through the hardware key) support iSCSI Boot Firmware Table (iBFT).
• PowerEdge systems shipped with Intel Xeon 5600 series processor and later versions support Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) with the latest shipping BIOS.
• You cannot automatically pre-activate the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and later versions operating system installed on virtual machines by using the product activation code in the Dell OEM installation media. You must use a virtual product key to activate the guest operating system. For more information, see the white paper, Dell OEM Windows Server 2008 Installation on Virtual Machines Using Dell OEM Media at dell.com.
• The ESXi image preinstalled on your PowerEdge system may not contain all the drivers required for peripherals. Additional drivers need to be installed to enable certain add-on peripherals. You can download the drivers from downloads.vmware.com.
• ESXi supports VD created with software RAID.
• vSphere 5 supports booting ESXi hosts in Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) mode. With UEFI, systems can be booted with ESXi from local hard drives, CD/DVD drives, or USB media. Booting over the network requires the legacy BIOS firmware and is not available with UEFI.
• On Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) enabled systems installed with ESXi, it is recommended that you populate all processor nodes with similar memory to enable balanced distribution of memory across nodes. With unbalanced memory distribution across nodes, you may face performance degradation issues or ESXi may fail to boot.

  NOTE: For more information about NUMA, see VMware knowledge base articles: kb.vmware.com/kb/1003690 and kb.vmware.com/kb/1570. Also, see VMware's Resource Management Guide for vSphere 5 at vmware.com/support/pubs/.

• ESXi 5.5 requires a minimum system memory of 4 GB on all supported systems. However, on some Dell PowerEdge systems with 4 GB, all the available memory is not allocated to the ESXi installer. This may result in an installation failure. Ensure more than 4 GB RAM is installed. For optimal memory configuration on Dell PowerEdge servers refer Server owners manual.
• To enable the Virtualization Technology (VT) feature, select System Setup, and then Processor.

  NOTE: To run 64-bit virtual machines on Intel processor-based servers, the VT feature is required to be enabled.