Installing ESXi on a Dell r510 (part 2)
- This is a continuation of installing ESXi 5.5 onto a dell r510 with the ESXi ISO from Dell instead of vmware's website. This kept us from needing to make an account from VMware for the download. We'll see what that approach does in a later post or just delayed the inevitable. TODO
- So we're chugging along, it takes a bit to load everything up. Especially from my USB 2.0 stick. Acquired for $4.99 at office depot because I wanted to get this started, but really the read times on http://usb.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1349/SanDisk-Cruzer-Blade are fairly terrible.
- Fantastic news though. Once we got into the Welcome to VMware ESXi 5.5.0 Installation screen. my router found 'A' nic plugged into it...should have found 2, but baby steps. My guess is it found the idrac shared port. (I previously set up IDrac to share nic 1 instead of using it's own port because I only have an 4 port router right now so router ports are hard to come by as of right now. However the Idrac should be named idrac-XXXXXX where XXXXXX is my Dell service tag, and it's blank. Baby steps.
- TODO-I need to figure out if there's a set standard for rj45 wire cabling color or if it is basically shop independent. having wires going all over hell and back would be nice to try and narrow things down by color, and then look for labels.
- I chose to install on my 4 disk raid 1+0 array and then hit my first snafu. It said Virtualization technology was either not turned on in the bios or not possible on this chip. Since I'm using a xeon e5503, xeons should all have Virtualization capabilities but I'm using near the lowest rung of the Xeon e55xx series so I wasn't sure, however I swore I had turned it on in the bios. So I exited the install before continuing, no reason to continue installing a Hypervisor for virtualization if the chip can't handle it.
- Second shot at installation doesn't produce the error but it gives a warning that my hard drives will be partitioned. Accept the notification, not sure why, but lets hit F11 and install
- Install seemed to hang at 28% for a few minutes, lets hope it continues and its just because of my slow read speed usb drive.
- Success, need to remove the usb drive before hitting enter for reboot.
- and again...the reboot shoots out my CD Drive. That'll be annoying.
- Ok ESXi is installed, however I need to manage it remotely and try to make the server useful. The screen of the server says, download tools to manage this host from: 192.168.1.102. Going to that page brings up a default page on where to download the management tools
- Now to figure out what Vsphere Client is versus the next download link of VMware vCenter
- The vSphere client luckily has a direct download link....of a 353mb file downloading at 1Mb/s, not too slow but definitely not the fastest.
- The vmware vCenter link doesn't have a direct link and puts you at some huge download page. I have no idea what all this stuff is, so this is going to be a little more work.
- Installing Vsphere Client
- installing microsoft J# compiler thing, probably going to need a reboot
- Logged into the Client by knowing it's IP address, and using root/the password I set during ESXi installation. However its telling me I only have 60days before my vms are destroyed....so I'll need to figure that out soon. TODO
- WHOOOO Went into IDrac and told the Idrac to get its IP address from DHCP instead of me assigning it directly. I believe that I didn't fill in all the information for a static IP address and it never worked because of it. I also changed it back from having the Idrac be accessed over a shared LOM 1 back to the Idrac port itself. I was getting worried because the IDrac wasn't even lightning up when something was plugged in and I wasn't sure if I just had a crap cable. I still cannot get anything from LOM2 so I'm wondering if it's setup as failover and not useful when LOM1 is working. I still have a 4port gigabit card that's working however that is going to be used for something, just not sure what.
- Proof that it's working. Interesting to see what's being used by default with ESXi without anything else running. And now I'm going to be sad because the r510 I bought came with 2x e5503 's which are some of the only processors without hyperthreading. However 2x e5520s in a matched pair...are 10 dollars for the set off ebay. Might be something I'm going to be upgrading soon. Baby Steps. Lets get a VM running first.
- It looks like I need a vCenter server running to access all the ESXi hosts that would be running per server. Probably overkill right now since I only have 1 server running. and since the 2 servers I have are manufactured 7 years apart. I question if i'm going to be able to do much just yet with them moving vms back and forth, I need to figure out what the long term purposes are. Where will data be stored and should I change my raid array on r510 with 5x160gbs
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