This is an updated post covering VMware Workstation 11 instead of Workstation 9, it’s been updated to cover installing using the formatwithmbr switch during the initial boot process as well as highlighting an issue with creating multiple USB keys from the same VM template.
This is still the the quickest and easiest method for me to install ESXi on to a host with no local CD\DVD drive.
Continue to read after the break for the updated build \ preparation process.
I recently came across an issue with my home lab that indicated I had an issue with my Cruzer Fit going to a Write Protect mode, doing a search online showed that a number of people were also exhibiting the same kinds of issues but this wasn’t being restricted to SanDisk Fit drives.
I have been a fan of the Cruzer Fit for a while now, it’s sleek size meant that prying little fingers (I have a two year old who loves to investigate) can’t pull it out and lose it and it looks great on the front of my Shuttle SH63H3 cases so I was a bit alarmed to realise that I may have to replace these with another brand of drive that may not offer me the same flush fit as the Cruzer Fit.
One thing I have to mention is that my usual method of installing ESXi in to my lab environment usually involves using VMware Workstation to create a VM, attaching a USB drive to the laptop and then attaching that to the VM, hey presto you have a readily available way of installing ESXi on to a system that doesn’t have a CD\DVD drive fitted. The reason I mention this will become clearer later on in the article.
Now I should mention that the original lab build was done on VMware ESXi 5.1 and I blogged about how to upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5 here, during that time I haven’t really had much need to make changes to my ESXi environment and didn’t take note as to if\when the SanDisk Cruzer Fit drives I was using in my environment went to read-only but I know it has to have been after the 5.5 upgrade.
Now how did I know that the drives had gone to a write protect mode? well carry on after the break to find out.
In this post we are going to configure the Synology Syslog server so that we can get rid of the message below that occurs because my servers use the SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB drives
In an earlier post I configured my Synology DS1513+ Storage server for iSCSI and enabled it for Multi-Pathing, in this post I will show you how to create and configure a vDS (vSphere Distributed Switch) for iSCSI use and how to enable Multipathing to use more than one network path to your storage (there by increasing throughput).
Using the vCenter client you can see that in the above screenshot that I have 4 Intel NIC ports on my hosts that aren’t currently assigned to a vswitch.
In earlier posts we have installed and configured vCenter 5.5 as well as assigning hosts to it, in this next post we are going to configure our iSCSI storage to allow us to later setup Multi-Pathing from our hosts to our storage.
In my home lab I am using a dedicated Synology DS1513+ for my storage, so let’s go set up the iSCSI LUNs on the Synology.
Log in to the Synology interface with your admin account
In the previous post we installed and configured access to vCenter 5.5, it’s great that we have vCenter installed but with no datacenter or Hosts configured we aren’t going to be doing too much with our new installation so what we need to do is add a new datacenter and a host to allow us to work with the vSphere suite.
Launch the Windows based vCenter Client
This post will detail all the steps required to install vCenter 5.5a on to a Windows 2012R2 guest machine, I should add that at the time of writing 2012R2 isn’t on the supported OS list and that there is an additional step that needs to be done to ensure that the installation succeeds first time.
You will need to get a copy of OCSetup.exe because for some insane reason Microsoft dropped the use of it in Windows 2012R2 (it’s present in 2012). As a side note you can also use a copy of the file from Windows 2008R2 if you don’t have 2012 available. Once you have a copy place it in the C:\Windows\System32 folder.
So with the release of ESXi 5.5 I decided to follow my previous instructions and upgrade my hosts using the esxcli commands.
1. Place the Host into Maintenance Mode and ensure that there are no running VM’s on the host.
2. Ensure you have SSH enabled
3. Make sure that the Outbound HTTP rule is enabled, either by using the console or via the command line later on (command line is esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient )
VMware has just announced the vSphere 5.5 product at VMworld 2013. Here are the new features and enhancements.
vSphere ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements
Virtual Machine Enhancements
VMware vCenter Server Enhancements
vSphere Storage Enhancements
vSphere Networking Enhancements
More details can be found in the What’s New in vSphere 5.5 Platform Guide
During the recent vForum event at Wembley I had an interesting meeting with Condusiv Technologies (formally Executive Software\ Diskeeper).
They were showing off the latest release of V-Locity VM.
V-locity VM is classed as a Performance Accelerator which offers benefits such as :-
What struck me was the performance potential for VM’s running on potentially limiting storage (it happens, in fact our storage at work is about on par with the performance one of our guys get’s from a Synology Diskstation 1513+ and yes we have fine tuned and tweaked).
I had a chat with their Technical Director and asked about an NFR or Evaluation license to allow me to do some testing in my home lab to see what kind of performance improvements can be gained from running V-locity VM in my environment.
It should be noted that the V-locity software is limited to the Microsoft platform of OS’s starting with Windows XP (SP2) all the way up to Windows 2012, it also supports both vSphere (ESX\i 4.0 or later) and HyperV as the host virtualisation platform.