So having some spare supported hardware lying around (A dell 2950), I decided to try out vmware’s ‘next generation hypervisor’, ESXi, that has added security and reliability!

The installer picks up on my PERC controller and it’s virtual disk without any issues, then installs very cleanly. Off to a great start, much simpler to deploy then any other 3rd party software I’ve used in a while.

I connect with my linux laptop, to download the management tools, to discover that vmware infastructure is windows only, but don’t fear, there’s a remote CLI for linux! I guess that almost makes up for no local CLI on the box itself.

Well now comes time to create a virtual machine and see what this thing can do. I start to initialize storage into a vmfs system, and discover that while vmware can see that the total size of my array exported by PERC is 2.7TB, it only contains 700GB usable space once formatted…. wait, what? It’s a known issue. I can understand a 2TB filesystem limit thanks to the wonders of the MSDOS disklabel, but why the silent failure, and why discard 2TB to use the 700GB? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Off to a little bit of a rocky start, I have to wipe the box and make two virtual disks instead of one now.

Well, now I have my shiny new ESXi box ready to install a virtual machine at long last. So I open the datastore file browser that’s in VI, and lo and behold, any file transfers fail with the cryptic error “I/O Error Occurred“. Well crap, how the hell do I install my OS?

Welp, turns out that the only way myself of various other on the vmware forums could figure it out was to open a root shell in “unsupported mode”. To do this, from the console of the machine hit alt-f1, and type the word “unsupported” (it won’t echo), and you should then be able to login as root. edit inetd.conf, and just uncomment the line to start dropbear (it’s a lightweight SSH dameon). Send a SIGHUP to inetd, or reboot the system for it to take effect.

The problem now, is that after a week of working beautifully, scp transfers have slowed to 80kb/s for unknown reasons. I can’t figure it out, and this is unsupported, so uh… crap.

I guess the lesson I learned today is that I should go talk to dell and ask for some ESX licenses to make up for the flammable servers.

[update 6/10/09] ESXi 3.5 update 2 seems to fix the file management tools in VI, so it’s now useable, and I have an ESXi server running rather smoothly.