VMWare ESXi on a hp Proliant Gen 8 MicroServer

At CASS Industries we were using Microsoft’s free Hotmail / Outlook connector for our group ware solution, howecver Micro$oft pulled that plug on us when they made changes to Outlook.com.

As a solution we picked up a HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 and fitted it with two 1TB hard drives, I intend to install Zentyal as a Exchange replacement.

Log in via iLO

You will need two Ethernet cables, one in the iLO (HP Integrated Lights-Out) port, and one into the first Ethernet port, on boot it will tell you the ip address for iLO, visit this in Internet Explore (Chrome and Firefox gave odd results when clicking out). you will want to get the trial licence so that you can use iLO’s Integrated Remote Console Java applet to connect iso files to boot.

Using ESXi on a Microserver

The ProLiant Microserver Gen 8 comes with 4 gigs of ram fitted, however since some of that is tied up to the integrated graphics, when you attempt to install VMware ESXi it spots that you have less that 4 gigs and moans, the work around is as follows:

1. Grab the VMware base image from HP – http://www.hp.com/go/esxidownload, and mount it using iLO.
2. Boot the Microserver while connected over the iLO clinet, with the VMware ESXi 5.5 disk image connected.
3. wait “Welcome to theVMware ESXi 5.5.0 Installation” screen:
   
4. Press Alt+F1 for enter console and login as root (no password needed);
5. Navigate to /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/util/: cd /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/util/
6. Delete the compiled file upgrade_precheck.pyc: rm upgrade_precheck.pyc
7. remove read only flags on the un compiled version of the file, and change the permisions:

   mv upgrade_precheck.py upgrade_precheck.py.def
   cp upgrade_precheck.py.def upgrade_precheck.py
   chmod 755 upgrade_precheck.py

8. Open script in vi: vi upgrade_precheck.py
9. find the line starting “MEM_MIN_SIZE” (search in vi by using /MEM_MIN), press ‘a’ to enter edit mode, you will want to change the 4 in (4 * 1024 - 32) to a 2; thus making it (2 * 1024 - 32). To finalise and save press ‘ESC’, run command :wq which is vi for save & exit.
10. look for the installer PID:ps -c | grep weasel,, and kill it kill PID, the Installer process will restart automatically with the modifications you have made.
11. Continue from “Welcome to the VMware ESXi 5.5.0 Installation
12. you can now use the VMware vSphere client to connect to your server.