With the release of Microsoft Server 2016 earlier this month, I decided it was time to actually fire it up on my home network. After a few fruitless searches online I decided to see if the same trick for running Windows 8 / 2012 on ESXi 4.1 would work and I was pleasantly surprised when it did !
There’s a proper Wiki article for it here but for now the basic steps are as follows:
- Create a new VM and set it as a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)
- Download the bios file from the VMware community and upload it to the new VM’s folder
- Edit the new VM’s .vmx file and add the following lines to the bottom:
bios440.filename = “bios.440.rom“
mce.enable = TRUE
cpuid.hypervisor.v0 = FALSE
vmGenCounter.enable = FALSE
You should now be able to install and run Microsoft Server 2016 or Windows 10 on your VMWare ESXi 4.1 server !
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