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Install VMware ESXi 8 on an old Lenovo Thinkstation M92p Tiny

IT Infrastructure Architect

I recently purchased an aging Lenovo Thinkstation M92p Tiny from an auction site for a bargain price. It has an i5-3470T processor, 8gb Ram and a 120gb SSD. 

My intent was to install VMware to host a couple of very lightweight but critical VMs required by my homelab. 

Unsupported

Unfortunately, VMware 8 (VMware-VMvisor-Installer-8.0U2-22380479.x86_64) would not install due to the i5-3470T processor not being supported.

To workaround, at boot, I pressed:

shift o

to edit boot options, then I appended:
autoPartitionOSDataSize=8192 forceunsupportedinstall=true allowLegacyCPU=true

The installer then proceeded successfully.

Commentary

autoPartitionOSDataSize=8192 forced the installer to create an 8gb partition on the 120gb SSD, leaving the remainder free for a datastore.

forceunsupportedinstall=true forced the installer to proceed despite the hardware being unsupported.

allowLegacyCPU=true forced the installer to use the unsupported processor.

Clearly, I won't be phoning VMware asking for support with this one. 

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