Hi all,
first of all my apologies for not having updated this blog in a long while. I’ve been overloaded with work, sick, overloaded with work, had my tonsils removed, we then moved offices and finally holidays came. During this time I’ve been extensively playing with the free release of vmWare ESX, ESX 3i release 3.5.0. After painstakingly efforts I managed to make it run on several HP Proliant ML 110 G4 servers, although they are unsupported. A lot of patience is required to make it run.
First steps to configure it properly, assuming you have burned the ISO on a CD and installed it on the machine:
When the VMWare Hypervisor screen loads after boot, press CTRL+O to enter boot options. Type in there nousbboot and press ENTER. This will make sure that it starts without attempting to mount the USB filesystem. Once the system has loaded, press F1 to access the console, type unsupported and press ENTER. You will be prompted for username, type root. You’ll have access to a regular shell prompt. To enable ssh, type vi /etc/inetd.conf – once in there, edit the file by removing the hash sign before sshd ( before: #sshd, after: sshd ). Save and exit by pressing the : sign to enter command mode in vi, then type wq (write and quit) and finally press ENTER.
Now you must restart the inetd process. Do so by doing a ps ax|grep inetd, get the PID and kill -HUP <PID> to restart the process. Once you’re done, you can access your ESXi machine through vmWare Infrastructure Client and go modify the settings to disable USB boot. Once the settings are saved, you can safely reboot your ESXi system.
You can then have fun remoting into the ESXi through SSH and most of all using SCP to copy/move virtuals.
More to follow soon!
Cheers,
Max