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ESXi – lessons learned part 3

Duncan Epping · Dec 22, 2009 ·

This is probably one of the last blog articles this year as I’ve got two weeks of holiday! I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year! Let’s cut the crap, and start with why you are reading this… ESXi Lessons Learned:

I’ve been looking into creating an unattended install for ESXi. As mentioned in Lessons Learned part 2 this is not something that can be done out of the box unfortunately. I did a quick search on the internet and the VMware internal mailing lists but couldn’t find anything useful and that’s why I booted the ISO and logged into the console via “ALT-F1” -> Unsupported -> enter.

After some fiddling around in the ESXi iso I noticed a file called “/usr/lib/vmware/installer/ThinESXInstall.py”. I am not a python guru but I guess the following lines were pretty obvious:

Steps = [ WelcomeStep, LicenseStep, TargetSelectionStep, ConfirmStep, \
WriteStep, PostConfigStep, CompleteStep, RebootStep ]

This line describes the steps taken during the install. After I noticed these I did a quick search again on the filename and an article came up of my friend from down under, Stu aka Mr Vinternals. Stu describes which steps can be removed to decrease the amount of manual intervention:

Steps = [ TargetSelectionStep, WriteStep, PostConfigStep, RebootStep ]

Only the TargetSelectionStep requires input at the moment but that is also something that can be fixed. Look at the script “ThinESXInstallSteps.py”. There is a section that describes the disk selection, you can automate it by altering it and selecting a local disk with “IsLocal()”. That’s all I can say for now….

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Server esxi, Lessons Learned, vSphere

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Comments

  1. Henk says

    23 December, 2009 at 16:05

    Can’t wait to do an unattended ESXi deployment.

    Would be nice if the hardware vendors (HP) made it possible to deploy ESXi from Altiris (RDP), but then again, you’d probably need a aclient agent for reinstalls…

  2. Mark says

    29 December, 2009 at 03:18

    Have you considered the bootable USB ESXi implementation? You can pre-create those and then boot them under VMware Player to configure them. Not exactly automated, but you can create/configure in about 10 minutes. Do a few per day and soon you have a box full of ESXi thumb drives ready to turn any server into an ESXi host.

  3. Duncan says

    29 December, 2009 at 09:13

    I know you can but I don’t consider that to be an enterprise ready solution. Lesser manual work means less chance of mistakes.

  4. dconvery says

    17 January, 2010 at 20:40

    So, I edit /usr/lib/vmware/installer/ThinESXInstall.py and then “tar -czvf” the image boots, but I get a PSOD. The message is “cannot setup ramdisk boot image is corrupted”

    Am I missing something? Its driving me CRAZY…

  5. dconvery says

    25 January, 2010 at 17:52

    Never mind… I was doing tar -czvf install.tgz . instead of tar -czvf install.tgz *

    DOH!

  6. Dave O. says

    26 August, 2010 at 19:03

    Is there any update on this for ESXi 4.1? I see that the install.tgz file is now install.vgz and I’m not sure how to untar that file to get at the installer files.

    Thanks!

  7. Dave O. says

    30 August, 2010 at 00:41

    I think i answered my own question. 🙂

    Looks like you just have to convert the vgz file to tar with vmtar and then untar and modify the ThinESXInstall.py file. Then tar it up, and use vmtar to convert from tar to vgz.

    I havent found any help on vmtar, but it looks like it converts from vgz to tar and back. So, the steps go something like this:

    Copy vgz file to 4.1 ESXi host.
    Convert to tar with vmtar:
    vmtar -i install.vgz -o install.tar
    Modify installer files as Duncans specifies in the blog
    Tar back up to install.tar
    Copy install.tar to 4.1 ESXi host
    Convert back to vgz:
    vmtar -c install.tar -o install.vgz

    If anyone can help demystify vmtar, I would love to hear it! 🙂

    Hope this helps.

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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