I recently got the opportunity to play with a new Dell T420, and I decided I would run ESXi 5 on it.
Background
My day job does not really allow me much hands on access to hardware any more so its been a while since I’ve gotten to build a new server, but I recently got the chance to work on this as a side project. The server came pre-installed with Windows 2012 Standard. I have a need to run a couple of VM’s and I decided I wanted to run ESXi on the host, and run the 2013 standard box as a VM. For anyone that is curious, I didn’t pick ESXi because its «better» than Hyper-V (I have no clue how they stack up anymore). I simply chose it because its been a couple of years since I’ve built an ESX host and I wanted to see how things have evolved.
The first thing I did was use the VMWare converter utility to P2V the existing installation out to a VMWare workstation format. I didn’t really need to do this since the OS was not customized yet, and I could reinstall, but this was a chance to play with the converter, and see if if I could PBV the existing installation and have it running on the newly rebuilt box. It worked well, and maybe I’ll write about that experience some day, but for now its all about getting the box built.
Installing Open Manage Server Administrator
So step one was to grab the installation bits from Open Manage Download. I went with version 7.3.0.2 as it was the most recent available. It downloaded the file to my workstation, as opposed to directly on the ESX host.
Next I started following the ESXi specific instructions in the Open Manage User Guide. While I can appreciate the time it takes to work up instructions that cover such a wide array of platforms, I found these instructions a bit lacking. They had several typos (missing spaces in command line commands) as well as were unclear on a couple things, so I’ll spend a little more time to add some details here.
I chose to go with the «Using The vSphere CLI» portion of the instructions, as it seemed to be the most straight forward for folks without existing ESX infrastructures in place. So with that, I had to download and install the vSphere CLI. This was pretty quick and painless. I didn’t poke to much at it, but it feels like its nothing more than a set of Perl scripts and it adds a shortcut to a CMD session which I presume just tweaks the shell with some environment variables
Now I copied the file over the suggested directory per the docs (I had to enable and start SSH access using the vSphere Client before this would work).
pscp OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-7.3.0-588_A00.VIB-ESX51i.zip [email protected]:/var/log/vmware/
Using keyboard-interactive authentication.
Password:
OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-7.3. | 6490 kB | 1622.6 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%
So I’m not sure how the docs assume you to unzip this, but I did it over an SSH
session, and the part that I messed up on first was that I unzipped the file
directly in /var/log/vmware/, when in reality all you have to do is run the
install command against the ZIP directly. There is no need to actually unzip it.
I later learned about the vSphere Management Assistant, which I think is geared toward keeping SSH out of the mix. for now I ran the command using the CLI
esxcli --server 192.168.1.1 software vib install -d /var/log/vmware/OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-7.3.0-588_A00.VIB-ESX51i.zip
Installation Result
Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
Reboot Required: true
VIBs Installed: Dell_bootbank_OpenManage_7.3.0.2-0000
VIBs Removed:
VIBs Skipped:
And then comes a reboot. Following the reboot I expected I would be able to hit the OMSA HTTPS interface at https://192.168.1.1:1311, however that didn’t work, and it turns out is more more involved, and covered in the «Accessing Server Administrator on VMware ESXi» section. Essentially it suggests that you have to a completely separate, server running the web server. In my case, this is the only box on the network so this seems like a crappy solution, but I suppose the logic is possibly to keep the number of system daemons to an absolute minimum. In any event, I was a bit disappointed to lose the web UI I’ve grown to know.
vSphere Management Assistant
At this point, I was a bit annoyed that I needed another system. While trolling for ways to potentially hack the Web server in directly, I came across a YouTube video on the subject at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hywERi8bc1c. While watching this at about 1:31 they jump to a screen I was not familiar with, and after a little digging I discovered the vSphere Management Assistant, so I proceeded to download and install the virtual appliance as it seems it will come in handy in the future as well.
So I downloaded the appliance, unzipped the file and and then followed the instructions at http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/index.jsp#com.vmware.vma.doc/vima_get_start.4.5.html. This all went really smooth.
Installing Dell OMSA into the vSphere Management Assistant
So I figured what the heck, at this point I have a VM already, lets install the OMSA web interface here since I couldn’t do it earlier. So I downloaded the file from the dell website (they make it harder than is should be to get a direct download link that I could wget from inside the VM so instead I downloaded it on my workstation and uploaded it.
pscp OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-LX-7.3.0-350_A00.SLES11.x86_64.tar.gz [email protected]:/tmp
Then via an SSH into the VMA appliance:
cd /tmp
tar -zxvf OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-LX-7.3.0-350_A00.SLES11.x86_64.tar.gz
sudo ./setup.sh
Accept the license agreement, and hit option 1 to install the Server Administrator Web Server Interface. Followed by pressing «i»
And about 2 minutes later, we have our good old friend, the Open Manager web interface available at https//vmaappliance_ip:1311, and I was able to use it to connect to my ESXi host. A bit of a round about where to get there, but something is better than nothing..