ESXI 6 seems to have a hard minimum requirement of 4GB RAM

With 2GB RAM the boot up process hangs at “User loaded successfully”

With 2.5GB RAM the boot up process goes past the above but throws many errors and eventually gives a screen with no text like below.

esxi-2.5You can login to the system by pressing F2 but all the network configuring options are grayed out. This is the case even if you boot up with 4GB RAM, configure network, then reduce RAM and reboot. The options are grayed out and you can’t ping the host. Trying to start the management services manually (Enable ESXi Shell, press Alt+F1, type /sbin/services.sh restart doesn’t work either).

With 3GB of RAM the boot up process hangs a while at “Running rabbitmqproxy start” but then pulls through. No IP address though and I can’t configure anything (even if I configure initially by booting up with 4GB RAM). I tried repairing network settings but that simply fails.

Didn’t try with 3.5GB RAM!

With 4GB of RAM the boot up process goes normally. In my case since I was playing with the host by increasing RAM in 500MB increments the network was still bust after booting with 4GB RAM. But I was able to restore the network and get it working.

So it looks like 4GB of RAM is more of a hard minimum requirement for ESXi 6. That sucks! I am able to install ESXi 5.5 with 4GB RAM and then decrease it to 2GB post-install with no issues. In my case all these hosts run in a laptop anyway so I just need them up and running with the bare minimum. Guess I won’t be able to do that with ESXi 6 (unless someone has a workaround, I didn’t search much on this topic – just noticed today and played around a bit).