Install ESXi 6.5 on a Supermicro X10SBA

January 19, 2018

Trying to install VMware ESXi on a number of Intel Bay-Trail boards apparently fails with a hanged installation right after a message like Relocating modules and starting the kernel. There’s multiple forum posts around the internet where people suggest various workarounds, which never seemed to work for me.

One suggestion which stood out to me as most promising was completely disabling the internal graphics chip and using a dicrete graphics card in the PCI Express slot. Now, I didn’t want to buy a graphics card just to make the installation work - especially since this system would mostly be used completely headless: power cord, two ethernet cables and done.