vSphere

Thomas Bishop AKA Tommy over at "Scale The Mind" created two real cool YouTube videos. On the first one he shows ESX 3i running within VMware Fusion. The second one shows the ESX 3i interactive shell.  Thomas and I are running parallel with the discovery of new ESX 3i features, we both found out how to run ESX 3i in a virtual machine and we also discovered some of the additional commands you could use during the bootstrap.  Thomas about the interactive shell : "The fact that it is possible to easily get an interactive shell with ESX 3i is going to prove to be a valuable resource in learning about the internals of it.  It looks like it is heavily dependent on a number of open source packages (no surprise there)". J Hicks joked about all the ESX 3i information and stated that we have ESX 3i running on an iPhone in no time. ;-)

When I was stumbling through the VMTN Discussion Forums I found a thread about  VMware ESX 3i Server. One little post from Olivier Crémel   over at VMware caught my attention. It’s dealing with the boot options you can use during the initial startup of ESX 3i. When you press <SHIFT> o during the bootstrap you can put in additional commands. The only command Olivier Crémel   revealed was the nousbBoot option but there must be more. Finally I opened the ESX 3i kernel in a hex editor and found  the complete list. Some of these commands have great potential.

maxPCPUS serialPort overrideSerialPortAddr baudRate
fakeNUMAnodes cpuCellSize netNumPortsets netNumGPBuffers
netMaxPCPUPktCacheSize  netPktNumSlabSizes netPktHeapMinSize
netPktHeapMaxSize storageHeapMinSize storageHeapMaxSize
passthruMem BOOTIF BOOTUUID  clockMultiplierMayVaryPerNode
memmapMaxPhysicalMemMB acpiDbgLevel nouseNUMAInfo
nompsIntRouting noforceCRS noACPI noexecutePOST 
nopageSharing nomemCheckEveryWord nohyperthreading
nologicalApicId nodumpDiag  norealNMI nologOnScreen
nonetESX2LegacyMode  nonetPktBufUseSlab nonetPanicBadDevOpen
nonetUseProc nonetUseMemcpyNt noioapic nopassthruEnabled
novga64 nosmallFontForTTY noauditMode noshell nopasswdReset
nousbBoot nouwSwap nobusSpeedMayVary noclockMultiplierMayVary
noassumeCommonBusClock noassumePerNodeBusClock 
nobusSpeedMayVaryPerNode  notimerEnableTSC notimerForceTSC
notimerEnableHPET notimerEnableACPI notimerEnableMPMC
nomemmapStressHighBitMPNs nopanicOnVmkernelAbort noconsole
noxapicAMDDetect noxapicForce nocheckCPUIDLimit novmkKeyboard
novmkTerminals nouseTSCForCPUHz nodebugBreak nologSynchronous
nofastHzEstimate buddyPhysicalMemoryDebugStruct
noclockMultiplierMayVaryPerNode
nobuddyPhysicalMemoryDebugStruct BootConfig_LogOptions
BootUser

Since my memory stick is broken I had to find out how I could carry on with exploring the new futures of ESX 3i. I was lucky; one of my fellow VMware trainers was willing enough to provide me with an image of his USB stick. What I did is use an existing virtual machine and added a one gigabyte hard disk. I downloaded Selfimage and placed the ESX 3i image on the new disk. I disconnected the disk and created a new virtual machine. I have chosen for “other Linux�? with one gigabyte memory and two network adapters and connected the ready made “one gigabyte disk�? as an existing disk. The last step was powering on the new VM. You see the result in the screen dump.

The ESX host is running so it’s time for the next step. The wizard shows the following message: “Your VMware ESX Server does not have any persistent storage. In order to run virtual machines, you must create at least one data store where virtual machines and other system files will be maintained�?. Let’s do it. I created a PDF document (datastore.pdf) with some screen shots. Then the trouble started. The final screenshot shows an error message and I thought lets use a real server instead of a desktop. I placed the USB key in a HP Proliant DL380 G5 and it wouldn’t boot from USB. When I got back to my desktop I discovered that the USB key is totally empty and doesn’t boot anymore :-( . Maybe someone at VMware can put a ghost image online? I received a lot of requests to share my copy and pbraren found out how to duplicate the USB key.

Plugins extend the capabilities of VirtualCenter by adding features and functionality not present in the base product. Generally, plugins have a server component and a client component. After the server component of a plugin is registered with a VirtualCenter server, the client component is available to all VirtualCenter clients connected to that VirtualCenter server. Users can download the client component of the plugin through the VirtualCenter client plugin manager. Users can select to enable or disable plugins installed in their VirtualCenter client. Disabling a plugin does not uninstall it from the client; it merely disables the functionality of the plugin. The VirtualCenter client interface might change after a plugin is enabled. New views, tabs, menus, and menu options related to the plugin's features are added to the interface. Existing interface items are not affected. The base product and plugins can be upgraded independent of each other. To reach the plugin manager, select Plugins > Manage Plugins.

Viktor commented on the “Loading VMware Hypervisor�? article and asked me to show more new features. Well Viktor you wish is my command ;-) To configuring a NTP server on a “normal�? ESX server you had to logon to the Service Console and manually edit some files before you could start the NTP daemon. Well in the ESX 3i version you can all do it from within the VI Client. Cool huh. In the picture you see the dialog box where this new option can be configured. Besides this new feature you should take a look at some other extras in on the configuration tab.

I got back from San Francisco and was unpacking my suitcase. I noticed the USB key I received when I picked up my T-Shirt and thought lets give it a try. This USB key contains a beta version of VMware ESX 3i – the next generation, thin hypervisor integrated into server hardware, providing the foundation for a virtual infrastructure. With this thin architecture, ESX Server 3i brings unprecedented levels of security, reliability and manageability to the IT infrastructure. I placed the memory stick in a Compaq EVO D50 desktop PC. After one or two minutes the kernel was loading and suddenly my VMware ESX Server 3i server was running.  I downloaded the new VI client version 2.1.0 build 54592 and installed it on my workstation. The next steps are configuring the storage and create a virtual machine. Stay tuned.