I’ve been researching server virtualization lately, and looking at several solutions. One of which is VMware’s vSphere hypervisor (previously known as ESXi server).

There’s a free version of vSphere available, that only requires you to register to download it along with a license. Installation on the other hand, proves to be extremely difficult when using hardware that isn’t on the official hardware compatibility list.

In computer hardware, a white box is a personal computer or server without a registered brand name – Wikipedia

Difficult… but not impossible.

As there turns out to be an unofficial whitebox list on vmware-help.com.

Additional drivers are available from here, then see instructions on how to use this automated script to populate an ISO/USB stick with a custom installation image.