Everyone in the office is doing it and I didn’t want to be left out so I downloaded VMware ESXi, intending to run it on a machine with an ASUS M2N-SLI motherboard.

As that machine was in use, I tested out ESXi on an older ASUS A8N-SLI board. In many ways the M2N-SLI is an evolution of the A8N-SLI so when ESXi installed and ran on the older hardware I was confident that it would work on the newer board too.

Not so.

Although ESXi worked when booted from a USB stick, the installer refused to run because it couldn’t find any supported disks. Clearly my SATA controller must be supported or the USB version wouldn’t be able to see the disks and create datastores, which it could.

The solution? I installed ESXi and created datastores on the A8N-SLI and simply unplugged the disks and plugged them in the M2N-SLI. Pleasingly the system booted first time and apart from telling it to use the (different) NIC on the new machine I didn’t have to do anything to get it working.