So 2 motherboards later I finally have a working Esx host, or at least the hardware for one, sort of.
Turns out the NIC the M5A97 R2.0 has onboard is not supported with ESXi which kind of sucks since I wanted to finish the build on the weekend but will now have to wait for the amazon delivery with the NIC instead.

I have returned the MSI board as it turned out to be busted. I picked up the M5A97, which is cheaper and actually posts, the only downside is that its extremely ugly. Light blue on brown, really ASUS?

I will keep this post short as there has not been much else going on. I will probably post my script for the samba setup this week, so there will be more content on this page soon.

M0nkey out.