Re: Install VmWare to anchient server

It is very old hardware; as old as a student in high school.

It looks like the motherboard takes Nocona and Irwindale Xeon CPUs.

https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/archive/Xeon800/E7320/X6DVA-4G.cfm

The Nocona and Irwindale CPUs are not in the VMware CPU HCL. It is already a sign you won't be able to install ESXi.

https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=cpu

None of the CPUs seems to have VT-x; so you cannot run 64-bit VMs, assuming you can get past the install of a very old ESXi version.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=27093,27085,27076,27087,27097,27077,27088,28014,28016

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=27080,27091,27092,27083,27094,27086,27078,27089,28015,28017,28018,28019,33103

Without VT-x, you can only run 32-bit VMs using Binary Translation even with VMware Player 12.x and earlier. 32-bit binary translation was removed in VMware Player 14.x and ESXi 6.7.