Lately I have been asked more and more to install an ESXi system on a whitebox. Why you may ask - because users (we are a R&D company) are asking to have a box with multiple operating systems with all kinds of configurations for testing purposes.

Now of course the ideal would be to say, "Sure, no problem! Let me deploy a VM for you!" But seeing that the infrastructure that our ESX farm resides on (Servers, Network, Storage) is a hell of a lot more expensive than $700 PC. And in that PC you can stuff a 500GB disk, 8gb RAM, and a Dual (sometimes Quad) Core Processor. That is more than enough to run 4-5 VM's on it without any issue.

Not every OS, needs to run on the Central infrastructure! I mean the cost involved regarding maintenance, licensing backup etc. etc. do not justify having every single OS on the main vSphere Farm. I know some of you will disagree, but that is my opinion. Each company has its policies regarding what is backed up, how often, and under what SLA things need to be maintained.

Now seeing that more and more of my users using VMware products in their daily tasks, be it VMware Player, Workstation, Server, and as of late the vSphere infrastructure client - they are familiar with the environment, they have a decent foundation of what virtualization does, and how it works.

So why add ESXi? Today deployed images that we use are including almost every version of Windows and multiple flavors of Linux (RH, Centos etc.)

We already have VMware images for all of the above OS's - way long ago. We saw this coming so we prepared the VM's of all the OS's.

Most of the Brand-Name PC's (IBM/Dell/HP) will run ESX4i out of the box without too much customization, and if the customization was needed, the hours invested were well worth it

Taking all of the above into account we found that building a custom CD of ESXi with some of our own additions, would provide a good solution to the growing need for a multiple OS computer.

The points that were covered:

• The License is free!
• Installation of ESXi takes less than 7 minutes
• These VM Operating Systems did not need peripheral devices (sound/USB)
• Images were optimized (size/performance)
• We added a Administrative user to each ESXi installation (customized in the image) for support
• All ESXi deployments were added to a monitoring system (Veeam Monitor Free Edition)

True there are limitations to the solution, and it will need to evolve. One of the things that I am actively looking at is the PXE deployment of ESXi.

In past to give a user a multiple OS machine - would take more than 4 hours, including deploying Main OS, installing VMware software (player/workstation/server) and then adding the VM image.

Today, deployment of ESXi and multiple images - is done in less than half of that time.

I would like to hear your thoughts and ideas on this one…

If you remember about 6 months ago I wrote an article about the fact that hot add of any kind of virtual hardware in the free free version of ESXi. I thought I would revisit the problems I had now that Update 1 was released last week.

The host has been upgraded to ESX4i Update 1

I took a Windows 2008 Guest OS.

Firstly, I noticed - CPU Hot plug was not available. Regarding memory Hot Add - I did have the option to turn on / off.

I powered on the machine. And started my journey again to add a new hard disk to the VM while it was powered on.

Edit Settings -> Add -> yada yada yada….. (you know the drill…)

I did not receive any errors

And Lo and Behold:

Tried the same with a second NIC

And Lo and Behold:

Last thing I tried - (you remember the memory/CPU hot-add from before.

This is not a feature that is offered with the free version of ESXi - but what the heck - the option was there, so I figured I would try it.

And I got shot down - as expected:

The questions I asked my previous article were:

1. The error message of course is not very well phrased - and I would love to know what "need have have" is?
2. Why in heaven's name would you take away the most basic functionality that has been in every single VMware product (besides Player) for the past 5 years? VMware? Please tell me that was a mistake?

So as you can see, the first has been fixed, and William Shakespeare will no longer be turning over in his grave.

Regarding the second one, I guess VMware realized the mistake, and have remedied the situation that arose with ESX4i. Thank you for correcting the problem

And of course - the removal of the above mentioned hardware (HD and NIC) works on a live machine as well.

Hope you enjoyed the ride!

And so this started today with a Twitter post. If you know it or not I am a big enthusiast of trying to install ESX on all kinds of hardware - especially Whiteboxes that are not on the HCL. I have tested it on a number of HP, Dell and IBM desktops. The great thing about this is - it mostly works, it is completely not supported, but a lot of fun to do. But to lug around with a desktop to present demos, is not always the most convenient thing in the world - to put it mildly.

What-if (or as you would say it in Powershell -whatif) you could create a system, that has a full demonstration environment of multiple VM's - and all of this on your LAPTOP!

From a query on the VMTN forums, I found this one.

It seems there has been a release (very very quiet one… sshhhh..) from the original GA code version 164009.

It now seems there are two versions of ESX4i floating around now.

ESX4i	ESX4i Free

There are no release notes for the new version, so I do not know if anything changed.

Feelers are out on Twitter - for more info. If I have any new info I will update this post.

Update 1- Found another post on the forums with the same build number.

Update 2 - Host Update Utility would not upgrade a ESX4i build 164009 vm

So I built a new VM with the new VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.0.0-171294.x86_64.iso

Now to see what has changed.

Update 3 - a quick check of what was reported in this post have not been fixed in this release.

One of the new features that were added to ESX4 is Hot-Add. What this feature does it allows you to add additional RAM or vCPU to your VM (if the operating System supports it)

Like any good vAdmin - I have upgraded my personal ESX box to Version 4. This is a whitebox with ESX3i installed.

Upgrade process was pretty simple as you can see in this previous post.

So if you noticed in my previous post after installing your license is a 60-day Evaluation with all the bells and whistles like below

The option of ESX4i - Free version - is available for up to 999 CPU's all you have to do is just ask.

So I requested a license key and after receiving the mail from VMware I proceeded to enter my license. Now we all knew that when entering the free license key in ESX3i you lost some functionality - like VCB - Virtual Center Agent etc. But for ESX 4i when changing the license - You lose a lot more in comparison - and I was shocked to find out how much.

One of the wonderful things you can do with ESX VM's is resize the VMDK's - it is a simple

vmkfstools -X 30G /<…..path to …. >.vmdk

And voila your vmdk just grew to the size you asked it to. So now you boot up your VM (for arguments sake - let's say it is a Windows 2003 Server) and you now have the extra space but in this case this was the system volume which cannot be extended while the system is live.

So the solution to this one is :

• Extend the volume
• Add the vmdk to a running Windows 2003 Server (while it is powered on)
• diskpart
• rescan
• select disk 1 (of course the number may vary)
• select partition 1 (same as above)
• extend
• Power off of this VM
• Remove the disk
• Power on the first VM again and hey presto you have a full partition including the extended space you just created.

Now this is all fine and wonderful - and it all relies on the fact that we expect that we can add resources to a running machine (namely HD / NIC - those are the ones that I use the most). This can be used in a large amount of scenarios - such as the one I had today - I had a lock on a file that I just could not get rid of. So I tried to do the same thing:

• Power off the VM
• Add the VMDK to another running machine
• remove the lock
• but …. hold on I could not !

I ran into this error:

ESX claims that I am trying to hot add a resource - which in all honesty is completely true.
I was. A vmdk.

So i wanted to check was this connected to the serial number I just changed before hand. So of course changing the license back to evaluation version I could add the hard disk without any issue. So I changed the license back and tried the same with adding a network card.

And yep you guessed correctly - same error message.

1. The error message of course is not very well phrased - and I would love to know what "need have have" is?
2. Why in heaven's name would you take away the most basic functionality that has been in every single VMware product (besides Player) for the past 5 years? VMware? Please tell me that was a mistake?

Update 30/05/2009

I have started a thread on the VMTN forum with this question but have as yet to hear any concrete response from VMware. The only shocking thing I found that if this is a licensing issue - then we are all in for a bigger surprise! The minimum, license level that you use Hot-Add is Advanced.

How do you like them apples?