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 !