VMWare ESXi Install
From CafeWiki
VMWare provides, as one of it's products, a hypervisor called ESXi. This product is free (as in beer) and appears to be ideal for consolidating a number of virtual servers on one box. The only requirement that puts a bit of a wrinkle in this, is that ESXi requires SCSI disks to operate - IDE and SATA are not supported. Therefore a network storage solution is required - Openfiler ought to do.
Hardware
This is the hardware that I decided to use for the ESXi system:
- Intel S3200SHV serverboard
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor
- 8 GB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz Memory
- 2 GB USB flash drive
- an old case with 500W power supply
That's right, no hard disk.
Installation
The steps to install ESXi and configure the basic settings are described here. The configuration and administration VMWare ESXi can be found on the ESXi page.
- Download the latest ESXI distribution from the ESXi Downloads site. For the box described above, the correct download is the i386 ISO. The current version is Update 3.
- Note that VMWare has a registration process and distributes licenses even for the free products such as ESXi. The ESXi license key will be required when configuring the server later on using the Virtual Infrastructure Client (VI Client). The license is provided by email.
- Following instructions suggested by Chris and located at Yellow Bricks, do the following:
- First get the following tools: IZArc (Free), WinImage(Shareware Demo)
- Open the ESXi ISO with IZArc (you may have to configure IZArc for ISO files first)
- Extract “install.tgz” to the desktop or a temporary working location.
- Open “install.tgz” with IZArc.
- Select “install.tar” and open it, another instance of IZArc will open.
- In the 2nd instance of IXArc, browse to “usr\lib\vmware\installer\”.
- Open “VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_3-123629.i386.dd.bz2″, and you get a 3rd instance of IZArc.
- Finally, extract “VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_3-123629.i386.dd”
- Insert the USB drive into a USB port
- Open WinImage and go to Disk, and select the USB drive.
- Select Disk, then “Restore Virtual Harddisk Image on physical drive”
- Double check that the USB is the physical drive selected.
- Select “VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_3-123629.i386.dd”
- And click “yes” to write the DD image to the USB Disk
- Take the USB drive and install it in the ESXi box and boot from the USB stick.
- Follow the installation steps:
- Set a root password.
- Configure the IP address of the box (use a static IP)
- Log into the ESXi web interface from another box on the network and check that you can reach it.
It's just that easy!
Setting up and managing your VMs is covered in the ESXi page.
