A little pre-setup,
- server turns on. Hooray. As a surplus buy with no kind of warranty or testing, this is very good
- Since the homelab is not sitting in a good environment I made an air filter out of a all black knee high nylon stocking. Put the front bezel inside it and snapped it right back in.
- Set up DiskGroup/Virtual Disk/
- I have set up my raid 10 with 4 drives and 1 global hotspare.
I've read about not ever using a hotspare, that the best practice would be when something fails, run a backup, then install the new hard drive, then have the raid array rebuild. This does have downtime, but if something goes wrong when rebuilding the new array with the hotspare, you basically lose all your data from between now and the last backup
- Setup Idrac...sorta
- I've changed the idrac gateway settings to my actual gateway. The Linksys wrt54gl assigning itself 192.168.1.1 instead of what dell looks for being 192.168.0.1 so things went a little crazy.
- Plugged in ethernet wires to idrac and both ports onboard the r510 and nothing is detected by the router. todo-->fixed Ctrl+E is your friend during boot
- Now it's time to set up ESXi so i can load something on this beast.
- First thing you want to do is see what version you're going to install. Unfortunately when you're being economical there's a chance that ESXi is no longer being supported with your hardware. Doesn't mean the version won't work, but it might get angry. I'll let you know what that anger entails later with some testing.
- So lets check if our hardware is supported.
- http://www.virten.net/2015/03/vmware-esxi-6-0-unsupported-hardware/
- pretty good post about what's supported and what isn't, supposedly being updated but I doubt that will last for long
- http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?
- VMware Official compatibility guide
- http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?keyword=13819&details=1&deviceCategory=server&productid=13819
- for my purpose with my Dell r510 I searched for Dell and xeon 55xx
- According to this Dell r510 only supported VMware 5.5 u3 , but the dell r710 supports 6.0 with the same chip soooo, lets see what sticks and try vmware 6.0 first
- Need to Download ESXi
- https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/6_0#custom_iso
- however I notice that there's a tab for Custom ISO's
- That sounds handy, clearly Dell should have one ready for me....
- and they don't list one vmware's website, clearly they should have one somewhere. Lets go find it.
- googled "Dell has released an ESXi" yeah, english majors cried here
- the second link however is very interesting for another project I'm going to be working on where ESXi does not work with software raid? http://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/vmware-esxi-6.x_Release%20Notes_en-us.pdf page 10
- You can download the Dell-customized ESXi installer image from dell.com/support/drivers. To create the ESXi installer media, complete the following procedure:
- Official instructions...seem to miss a few steps
- You need to goto the drivers and downloads of your machine.
- To get there goto the generic support page http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/ and put in your Dell tag. This will bring up the page of your machine that has a link to find the drivers and downloads section.
- Changing your OS, however does not give the option to get esxi 6.0 and stops at 5.5. Ok vmware you win for now.
- EDIT: As an alternative I found this ESXi 6.0 Dell Installer Link This Link however has a section dedicated to what systems are supported.
- Well, that's alot of files and possible updates I need to deal with todo
- Looking around in the headings finally pans out in Enterprise Solutions and I download the most current ESXi iso image.
- I right clicked download and used save link as because reading a line right above it that says this will install after being downloaded and requires a restart on a hypervisor, or anything on this page is questionable.
- I also just managed to blow up google chrome, and destroyed this blog post's formatting somehow. Luckily I'm used to finding bugs and after alot of shift tabs to go backwards with my bullets and copying things into notepad and then back out to remove saved blogger formatting, all is fixed.
- Need to put the ESXi iso bootable image onto something.
- Since the file is only 360 mb this could go directly onto a cd and will probably be my plan in the future once i know that I don't have any other things to put onto this cd.
- First step is to put it on a USB drive and see if anything works.
- So how does one make a USB bootable for ESXi.
- Google lights the way again with http://www.virten.net/2014/12/howto-create-a-bootable-esxi-installer-usb-flash-drive/
- So I download Rufus to make the USB, however on Rufus website there's a good point. If you need to make an ISO yourself of something you own, you can use one of my favorite pieces of software Imgburn. However I would recommend going to oldversion, the latest version of imgburn had some nonsense bundled with it.
- Image shows a few things you should be clicking on
- Boot from usb
- The server didn't find a place to boot from because under harddrive it listed the boot order as perc first and the usb stick second.
- Press F11 to goto boot menu, goto harddrive and selection the Dell-ESXi-5.5U3-xxxxx-Axx installer
- Holy Hell stuff is loading, next blog post we'll see how well it does.
- Need to figure out how to do this remotely instead of being right next to this server somehow through a console. TODO
Continued on in part 2: http://archyver.blogspot.com/2016/10/installing-esxi-55-on-dell-r510-part-2.html
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