A few months ago, you may have seen my post detailing my experience with ESXi 7.0 on HP Proliant DL360p Gen8 servers. I now have an update as I have successfully loaded ESXi 8.0 on HPE Proliant DL360p Gen8 servers, and want to share my experience.
It wasn’t as eventful as one would have expected, but I wanted to share what’s required, what works, and stability observations.
Please note, this is NOT supported and NOT recommended for production environments. Use the information at your own risk.
A special thank you goes out to William Lam and his post on Homelab considerations for vSphere 8, which provided me with the boot parameter required to allow legacy CPUs.
With the release of vSphere 8.0 Update 1, and all the new features and functionality that come with the vSphere 8 release as a whole, I decided it was time to attempt to update my homelab.
In my setup, I have the following:
Since I have 2 servers, I decided to do a fresh install using the generic installer, and then use the HPE addon to install all the HPE addons, drivers, and software. I would perform these steps on one server at a time, continuing to the next if all went well.
I went ahead and documented the configuration of my servers beforehand, and had already had upgraded my VMware vCenter vCSA appliance from 7U3 to 8U1. Note, that you should always upgrade your vCenter Server first, and then your ESXi hosts.
To my surprise the install went very smooth (after enabling legacy CPUs in the installer) on one of the hosts, and after a few days with no stability issues, I then proceeded and upgraded the 2nd host.
I’ve been running with 100% for 25+ days without any issues.
I used the following steps to install VMware vSphere ESXi 8 on my HP Proliant Gen8 Server:
After that, everything was good to go… Here you can see version information from one of the ESXi hosts:
I was surprised to see that everything works, including the P420i embedded RAID controller. Please note that I am not using the RAID controller, so I have not performed extensive testing on it.
All Hardware health information is present, and ESXi is functioning as one would expect if running a supported version on the platform.
Note that with vSphere 8, VMware is deprecating vLCM baselines. Your focus should be to update your ESXi instances using cluster image based update images. You can incorporate vendor add-ons and components to create a customized image for deployment.
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View Comments
Hi
I have the same set up.
How did you get AMS/iLO4 to work?
I see AMS as unavailable in my iLO console
Thanks
Hi Mark, it appears that AMS isn't working when using 8.x with these older unsupported servers.
Hi
I am not going mad then ....
Awesome guide. I've been wanting to install 8 on my own DL360p for a while and have it as emergency backup. This was very helpful.
Hi Stephan,
I have DL380 Gen9. Can you please suggest it will work for DL380 Gen9 too. But mine is HPE HCI with DL380 gen9. I have esxi6.0 with my VSAN.
Hi Milindng,
You'll need to check the HCL to find out whether it's supported or not (https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php).
Even if it's not supported, you may still be able to run ESXi 8 on it, but keep in mind you only want to run supported workloads for production environments.
Cheers
Hi! Thanks for your tries :)
Please, can you tell me if this tuto can work on ML310e G8 v2?
Thanks a lot
I was able to install AMS on a Dl380 G9 on ESXi 8.0U2 using this HPE Bundle:
https://support.hpe.com/connect/s/softwaredetails?language=en_US&softwareId=MTX_20d58b3728d94ea586e8f613fe
https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=emr_na-a00073323en_us
on install i just used the flag --force and it went through
Hope this helps and remember that this should not be used in production, and only on a lab environment