I just found out last night that VMware ESXi, VMware’s bare metal hypervisor, is now available for free. I got really excited and wanted to try it out right away so I decided to use my Lenovo ThinkPad X60s laptop as a test machine. I backed up all my files last night so I can play around with ESXi on it today.

So I installed it from the bootable CD which seem to have installed fine, but when I tried to change the network settings I keep getting the “Restore Network Factory Settings” screen. It turned out that my onboard NIC is not supported :(.

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to wait until Tuesday when I get back to work to test it out on our test server (which is in the Hardware Compatibility List so that one shouldn’t have issues).