breathalize

UPDATE: It looks like this has changed – both the 460G1 and the 685G1 is now back on both the HP support list for ESX 4.1!

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/servers/4x-servers.html

I have to admit I do not always check the VMware HCL when moving from version to version of ESX. Normally I would check when there was a major release from say ESX3 to ESX4 as it would be a natural point to retire old hardware.

As part of our move to ESXi I was refreshing one of the environments and suffered some issues while trying to PXE build a blade. After trying various fixes and reading up on suggestions I came across a post stating that the BL685G1 (the blade I was trying to rebuild with ESXi 4.1) was no longer supported as of the release of 4.1.

I was somewhat surprised to read this, so off to the HCL I went and sure enough it would appear that HP have taken 4.1 as the opportunity to ditch the BL685 G1 from support.

So painfully in mid-version ESX4 it looks like we have to source new kit to keep up with VMware releases – which is a shame as other HP and Dell models with the same AMD Opteron 82xx processors seem to remain on the HCL for 4.1 .. and the blade seems to run 4.1 absolutely fine.