The goal was to install on a new SSD hard drive I had just for this occasion. I wanted to keep the original hard drive as is in the event I ran into issues and had to revert back (and it was close, I almost had to revert back!).
I had some issues with the 5.5 installer seeing my hard drive, which I think was caused by the hard drive being on a no longer supported SATA controller (ASMedia, which I didn't realize was no longer supported). So, I temporarily moved the drive to another controller, did the install, and eventually moved it back (eventually with a few adjustments to make it work).
When I initially moved the drive back to the ASMedia controller, ESXi would boot, but would not recognize its own datastore. ESXi also couldn't find the network card I was using nor the SAN connected via eSATA also off the ASMedia controller. I then thought I'd try a fresh install of 5.0 and then upgrade (hoping it wouldn't remove drivers that were being used) which was mostly successful. the upgraded 5.5 installation could now see the network card, but it still couldn't see the drives attached to the ASMedia controller.
After some searching, I caught a lucky break and came across some drivers to load (http://www.v-front.de/2013/11/how-to-make-your-unsupported-sata-ahci.html). Thanks for the support! (I remembered afterwards that somebody posted this same issue as a comment to one of my earlier posts - dang, should have remembered!) This did the trick. After the load, a quick reboot, everything was successful! I then moved the new drive back to it's original SATA controller and everything came up wonderfully!
The first items on the agenda included configuring the hardware pass through and licensing. Both were easy without any issues.
Then it was on to adding the virtual machines back to the inventory and powering them on. I encountered no issues with the inventory. I was forced to remove the PCI devices configured for hardware pass through and add them back to the VM. I also ran into an issue with starting a VM with USB.
Error:
Error message from ESX1: Failed to register the
device pciPassthru0 for 0:29.0 due to unavailable
hardware or software support
With some more searches, and a test with another machine that was successful booting that also had USB installed, lead me to adding the pciHole.start/.end parameters to the VM's configuration file. This is the same configuration I originally used to power on a VM that was using a video card.
pciHole.start = "1200"
pciHole.end = "2200"
That about sums it up. I also loaded the latest ESXi 5.5 patch as well (ESXi550-201407001.zip) without any issues. Now I'm able to use a version of ESXi fully licensed to support my 64GB of memory! Yeah!
As for upgrading the VM tools and hardware profiles, I'll be doing that later. I want to make sure everything is stable before doing that. But, when I do the hardware profile upgrade, I'll be going to version 9 from the command line (version 10, from what I've read, is only supported with the vSphere web client). But, the process is fairly simple (I had to do this when testing a nested ESXi 5.5 cluster at work - the hardware profile version 9 offered better support for something).
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