Thanks for replying but we went for boot from usb... a lot easier to setup, a lot easier for troubleshooting. With the broadcom 5709 you should configure a software iscsi initiator on vmware via commandline during setup. But we didn't bother to go that far !
I'm trying to setup boot from iscsi between vmware 5 and a VNXe3100. I configured and iscsi server and a lun / generic iscsi storage, configured host access with the ip address of the host as well as the iscsi iqn with access to the virtual disk. It's a Broadcom 5709 NetXtreme II card (quadport) with hardware iscsi. I went into the broadcom bios and configured the ip address of the initiator and the target -> VNXe Then I started the VMware installation, but it cannot find the storage device !  can't find anything useful in the documentation or google. During post, the broadcom is also not able to logg into the iscsi target: establish tcp connection with target failed !  Any advise please ?
vmware 5 boot from iscsi problem