ESXi 4.0 on the Thinkpad T61 (Intel ICH8M)

I sometimes need an ESX instance that I can potentially destroy at will. I also didn't want to have to have to purchase a supported system as the cost is many times that of normal commodity hardware. An ESXi whitebox (i.e. systems that are not on VMware's Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)) are perfect for this. ESXi found my T61 laptop's Intel ICH8M SATA controller and the 82566MM NIC. It allowed me to create a VMFS (but forced me to completely wipe the local drive, there were no options to only create the VMFS in free space). I could even create VMs and boot them. So, on the surface it all looked fine. But I quickly discovered performance was worse than expected (and I wasn't expecting much on a laptop HD), but what really doomed the setup was the that sometimes the storage would just stopped responding for minutes at a time. I'd open up storage browser and the system would just sit.

So, the summary is that yes ESXi will boot on a Thinkpad T61 (or X61), but you're going to need some NFS or iSCSI storage to create stable setup that will run VMs. I ended up switching to Hyper-V for now, but ultimately I'll move to KVM.