When I was stumbling through the VMTN Discussion Forums I found a thread about VMware ESX 3i Server. One little post from Olivier Crémel over at VMware caught my attention. It’s dealing with the boot options you can use during the initial startup of ESX 3i. When you press <SHIFT> o during the bootstrap you can put in additional commands. The only command Olivier Crémel revealed was the nousbBoot option but there must be more. Finally I opened the ESX 3i kernel in a hex editor and found the complete list. Some of these commands have great potential.
maxPCPUS serialPort overrideSerialPortAddr baudRate
fakeNUMAnodes cpuCellSize netNumPortsets netNumGPBuffers
netMaxPCPUPktCacheSize netPktNumSlabSizes netPktHeapMinSize
netPktHeapMaxSize storageHeapMinSize storageHeapMaxSize
passthruMem BOOTIF BOOTUUID clockMultiplierMayVaryPerNode
memmapMaxPhysicalMemMB acpiDbgLevel nouseNUMAInfo
nompsIntRouting noforceCRS noACPI noexecutePOST
nopageSharing nomemCheckEveryWord nohyperthreading
nologicalApicId nodumpDiag norealNMI nologOnScreen
nonetESX2LegacyMode nonetPktBufUseSlab nonetPanicBadDevOpen
nonetUseProc nonetUseMemcpyNt noioapic nopassthruEnabled
novga64 nosmallFontForTTY noauditMode noshell nopasswdReset
nousbBoot nouwSwap nobusSpeedMayVary noclockMultiplierMayVary
noassumeCommonBusClock noassumePerNodeBusClock
nobusSpeedMayVaryPerNode notimerEnableTSC notimerForceTSC
notimerEnableHPET notimerEnableACPI notimerEnableMPMC
nomemmapStressHighBitMPNs nopanicOnVmkernelAbort noconsole
noxapicAMDDetect noxapicForce nocheckCPUIDLimit novmkKeyboard
novmkTerminals nouseTSCForCPUHz nodebugBreak nologSynchronous
nofastHzEstimate buddyPhysicalMemoryDebugStruct
noclockMultiplierMayVaryPerNode
nobuddyPhysicalMemoryDebugStruct BootConfig_LogOptions
BootUser