ESXi 4.1 kickstart is adequate for most things but I still have several issues with it that I consider ‘bugs’:<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0 If you’re not connected to a network, it doesn’t work.\u00a0 This is fine since most people will be on a network with VMware anyway right?\u00a0 Fine, I’ll let this one slide.\u00a0 But if you just have a machine and a usb stick, then why do you need the network?\u00a0 Sure you’ll have it eventually but I just want to test it on my server on my desk…<\/p>\n
2.\u00a0 The kickstart file likes to stop and give you alerts even if everything is ok.\u00a0 As an example:\u00a0 In the post install script if I don’t put the interpreter it stops and gives me a note:\u00a0 “Interpreter not specified, using busybox”\u00a0 That’s fine, that’s what the default is.\u00a0 Why stop me?\u00a0 The docs state clearly that the default is busybox.<\/p>\n
3.\u00a0 Name resolution doesn’t work in postscripts.\u00a0 If you’re trying to get information from other hosts, it doesn’t work.\u00a0 Forget it.\u00a0 Just put in the IP address in your post install script.<\/p>\n
4.\u00a0 USB installations without kickstart don’t work.\u00a0 You need to have a CD\/DVD image.\u00a0 This is lame.\u00a0 In an era where most servers I deal with don’t have DVD roms, why make me buy a usb DVD drive?\u00a0 A $10 usb stick should do this just fine.<\/p>\n
5.\u00a0 Lack of mount support.\u00a0 This kills me.\u00a0 I want to have a USB drive boot up ESXi 4.1 in kickstart and then boot up with a virtual machine.\u00a0 Problem is my virtual machine is 60GB.\u00a0 After digging around, I see that ESXi 4.1 can get files from a FAT32 filesystem by using the mcopy command.\u00a0 (It doesn’t do a mount).\u00a0 But what I really want is ext3 support so that I can copy 60GB files onto a hard disk.\u00a0 I’m thinking about hacking an ext3 driver for busybox, but I don’t know how difficult that will be.\u00a0\u00a0 Right now, my options seem to break up my disk image into 2GB chunks so they fit on the FAT 32 partition… lame.\u00a0 Anyway, please don’t tell me to consider NFS and all that stuff, because I know that’s the optimal solution.\u00a0 This project is a little different than what you may be thinking of.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I don’t want to keep complaining, so here are some nice things:<\/p>\n
We want SSH on our machines, even if its not supported.\u00a0 So we add this to our kickstart file:<\/p>\n
%firstboot –interpreter=busybox –unsupported –level=47<\/p>\n
sed -ie ‘s\/#ssh\/ssh\/’ \/etc\/inetd.conf<\/p>\n
As I mentioned you can’t mount USB drives on ESXi 4.1.\u00a0 (At least I haven’t figured it out yet).\u00a0 You can do passthrough with the USB drives so that the VMs can mount them, but you can’t actually mount it on the hypervisor.<\/p>\n
However you can copy files from the FAT32 partition.\u00a0 Here is an example of a command to use in a kickstart file:<\/p>\n
mcopy -i \/dev\/disks\/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:1 \\::IMAGEDD.BZ2 \/install_cache\/IMAGEDD.BZ2<\/p>\n
(In fact, this is the exact command used by the installer to grab the bz2 image from the fat 32 partition)<\/p>\n
So if you had a file named foo on there, you could substitute it in for the IMAGEDD.BZ2 file name and copy it onto your hypervisor.\u00a0 I would do this for copying *vmx files or things like that.<\/p>\n
There’s one catch:\u00a0 The mcopy command is available during installation, but upon reboot, there is no mcopy command!\u00a0 So if you want it, then a good idea is to copy it during the kickstart file to some place where you can get it after its installed.<\/p>\n
Anyway, happy VMware VMworld to all you who are going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ESXi 4.1 kickstart is adequate for most things but I still have several issues with it that I consider ‘bugs’: 1.\u00a0 If you’re not connected to a network, it doesn’t work.\u00a0 This is fine since most people will be on a network with VMware anyway right?\u00a0 Fine, I’ll let this one slide.\u00a0 But if you…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[74,920,39],"tags":[68,13,921,981],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2817,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions\/2817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}