TUTORIAL Mod ESXi 6.7 for an old AMD CPU

[our0]

Hello,

 

When fiddling with my setup, I finally decided to give ESXi a try. Long story short : I managed to get it to work but in my case it was useless 😅

Still, decided to share my results for people running old hardware like mine (N54L HP microserver with AMD Turion dual-core)

 

You need to know how to use an hexadecimal editor, and unpack some files.

 

thanks to this guy for his explanations : https://commander614.wixsite.com/website/single-post/2018/07/08/allowing-unsupported-cpu-s-on-esxi-67 - his procedure is intended for intel CPU, I wanted to apply it on AMD.

 

I worked on ESXi 6.7 update 3

 

- download ISO from vmware website

- use rufus to write it on a usb flash drive

- get b.b00 and weaselin.t00

- both are gzip compressed, use 7-zip or similar program to extract them

- original filename for b.b00 is vmkBoot.ELF32-psigned, open it with hexadecimal editor

- search for first occurrence of 83 F8 12 (it's the first one from the start should be on offset 124FA) and change it to 83 F8 01

- save changes and gzip it back to b.b00

- original filename for weaselin.t00 is weaselin-weasel.vtar, you can either open it with code editor or hex editor

- search for string "elif vendor == "AuthenticAMD" and family < 0x15" (respect casing and spaces) and change it to "elif vendor == "AuthenticAMD" and family < 0x10"

- save changes and pack it back to weaselin.t00

- installer should work now

- after installing it, the program will complain again about being not compatible. On installation media, copy modified b.b00 and weaselin.t00

This time it's good to go

Edited March 7, 2022 by our0