Maybe ask on the VMware support site. There may be other people that have had similar issues with others (non-Dell/non-1430) servers/systems and were able to get a solution.

Did that just before I posted here actually :) I dug through the forums a bit but wasn't able to find anything directly applicable, but I'm still slogging through, trying to find the magic post... Thanks for the suggestion!

Chiefmojo,

Have you found any resolution to this? Since your reply to my thread and my numerous problems using VMware server, VirtualBox, Xen, I think I need to try ESX.. but because of your findings, I havent tried ESX.

Yes! I apologise for not getting the resolution up before now. It's been remarkably busy for me lately and I just never looped back around to this :(

 

Basically, if you don't have VT support turned on in the BIOS before you install ESX you have to do a full reinstall. Make sure you wipe all the partitions, with the exception of any vmfs partitions which can stay. If you don't format the partitions ESX will maintain some of the pre-existing configuration and the presence of VT is one of the things that is inherited. I *thought* I had done a clean wipe at one point but I must have been mistaken. When I did finally do clean reinstall everything worked as expected.

 

Hope it works for you -- I wouldn't expect you to have any problems but if you do let me know and I'll see what I can do. 

Thats great, an easy fix. Thanks for posting this.