ESXi 5.5 Hardware Requirements

Make sure the host meets the minimum hardware configurations supported by ESXi 5.5

Hardware and System Resources

To install and use ESXi 5.5, your hardware and system resources must meet the following requirements:

Supported server platform. For a list of supported platforms, see the VMware Compatibility Guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.

ESXi 5.5 will install and run only on servers with 64-bit x86 CPUs

ESXi 5.5 requires a host machine with at least two cores

ESXi 5.5 supports only LAHF and SAHF CPU instructions

ESXi 5.5 requires the NX/XD bit to be enabled for the CPU in the BIOS

ESXi supports a broad range of x64 multicore processors. For a complete list of supported processors,see the VMware compatibility guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.

ESXi requires a minimum of 4GB of physical RAM. Provide at least 8GB of RAM to take full advantage of ESXi features and run virtual machines in typical production environments.

To support 64-bit virtual machines, support for hardware virtualization (Intel VT-x or AMD RVI) mustbe enabled on x64 CPUs

One or more Gigabit or 10Gb Ethernet controllers. For a list of supported network adapter models, see

the VMware Compatibility Guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility

Basic SCSI controllers. Adaptec Ultra-160 or Ultra-320, LSI Logic Fusion-MPT, or most

NCR/Symbios SCSI.

RAID controllers. Dell PERC (Adaptec RAID or LSI MegaRAID), HP Smart Array RAID, or IBM

(Adaptec) ServeRAID controllers

SCSI disk or a local, non-network, RAID LUN with unpartitioned space for the virtual machines

For Serial ATA (SATA), a disk connected through supported SAS controllers or supported on-board

SATA controllers. SATA disks will be considered remote, not local. These disks will not be used as a

scratch partition by default because they are seen as remote

NOTE You cannot connect a SATA CD-ROM device to a virtual machine on an ESXi 5.5 host. To use the

SATA CD-ROM device, you must use IDE emulation mode.