I had some trouble installing in VMWare Desktop until I realized I was trying to do it in ver 10 by default, switched to 9 and it ESXI installed just fine.

This walk-through will show you how to install VMware's ESXi hypervisor on bare-metal hardware for the purpose of hosting client-based virtual machines.

Now mgmt says, "Great Server-guru, now install the barebones VMware Hypervisor ESXi v4.1 on the new Servers because we're transitioning to virtualization!" ...