ESXi 5 Build

In 2009 I was a victim of the recession like many people were.

During my time of unemployment I elected to pursue some IT certifications to enhance my skill set.  One of these was the Microsoft Certified IT Professional:  Enterprise Administration, or MCITP: EA for short.

I elected to go the self-study route and used the Microsoft Press Self-Study kit (link to amazon page).  At this point in time Windows Server 2008 R2 had just recently been released so the exam and study materials were based on Windows Server 2008.

I won’t go too in-depth to what the kit contained as that is not the focus of this post.  The important fact is that the kit contained lab exercises that required multiple servers and clients.

Microsoft suggests going the virtualization route by using Virtual PC or Virtual Server, both of which require and valid Windows license.  I elected to use VMware ESXi 3.5 as it is more prevalent in the market place now and it is free.

The original machine I used was a off-lease HP tower with a P4 3.4 Ghz processor, 4GB RAM and 700GB hard drive space.  ESXi 3.5 installed after purchasing a SATA controller card that was on the VMware Whitebox HCL (link to site).  The whole build cost me just under $300 Canadian.

Due to the fact that the P4 is a 32bit processor, I was unable to use ESXi 4 or use 64-bit VMs.

After almost two years of use, I saw the need to be able to run 64-bit VMs.   

After a bit of research I selected the components for a ESXi 5 white-box build.  VMware extended the HCL for ESXi 5 and I was able to build a box with the following components:

AMD Phenom II X6 2.6 GHz CPU

Asus M4A88T-M (AMD 880G chipset)

12GB DDR3 PC3-10666 RAM

1TB 7200 Hard drive

24x DVD-RW

The build and install went flawless.  The only issue I had was with an add-on Realtek 8139A NIC that is supposed to be supported.  When I connected to the host via SSH and ran lspci, it showed up, but ESXi was unable to see it.  So I am just running with the integrated NIC (Realtek 8138) for now.

I added a 500GB hard drive from the old ESXi 3.5 server and expanded the datastore to a total size of 1.5TB.

Instead of re-installing all of my VMs from scratch.  I used VMware Converter to move the VMs from the old host to the new one.  It’s sort of like VMotion, but the VMs have to be powered off, and it can’t be done on the fly.  But it’s much more efficient than transferring the files via SSH.

After verifying all VMs were working, I upgraded or installed VMware Tools on all the guests that I was currently using.  ESXi 5 has an in-place upgrade for older versions of VMware Tools.

I then proceeded to upgrade the ESXi server to the latest build.

After finding the VMware Infrastructure Update Client was no longer supported in ESXi 5, I proceeded to do a bit of Googling until I found some instructions on how to download and install the latest patches.

After going to VMware’s downloads section and selecting the patch, you have to download it locally to your machine since the version of wget that comes with ESXi 5 doesn’t support https.  After doing so you must scp it to the datastore on the ESXi host.  You then post the host in maintenance mode and run the following command:

esxcli software vib install --maintenance-mode  --depot /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi500-XXXXXXXXXXXX.zip

Replace the Xs with the patch number.

When in maintenance mode all VMs must be shutdown.

If the patch requires a reboot, it will tell you during the installation process.