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bigteks
Contributor
Contributor
‎08-08-2008 10:08 AM

How to set up multi-boot ESXi

I have a DL380 G2 with Windows Server 2003 on drive 0. I want to install ESXi on drive 1 in a multi-boot config. SuperGrubDisk doesn't seem to recognize ESXi as a valid Linux install so whenever I try to install grub it fails. I tried every option in SuperGrubDisk and also tried the UNetbootin method with no success. What's the right way to do this?

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5 Replies
Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal
‎08-08-2008 01:24 PM

There have been a few other people on this forum that have asked / tried this and I think it has been without success. ESXi initially uses syslinux, but ESXi itself is not based on Linux.

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bigteks
Contributor
Contributor
‎08-08-2008 01:54 PM

When I booted under the knoppix live CD I can see that ESXi partitioned the drive into a 4 MB syslinux boot volume, 2 50MB FAT16 volumes, a 110 MB "unknown" file system, and another 540MB FAT16 volume. I wish I knew more about grub, I would just try to hack it in to the /boot volume. I think once supergrubdisk can see the right grub file structure on /root it will install on the MBR and be happy.

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etfong
Contributor
Contributor
‎08-08-2008 05:11 PM

This is a bit frustrating not being able to multi-boot. On the otherhand USB boot is working swimmingly and I was able to create them VMs. They run fast and can allocate up to 4 cpus. Not sure why there is a limit since I'm running a dual Xeon with 8 physical cores.

Any Busybox experts out there that can help with the boot issue? I believe that is what ESXi is running.

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal
‎08-08-2008 05:20 PM

Up to a four vCPU VM is all that is supported at this time (that goes for ESXi free and ESX regular). And each vCPU will only run as fast as a single core so just one 4 vCPU on your host would only max out 4 cores.

ESXi is not built on busybox. The vmkernel is proprietary software and doesn't have Linux in it. ESX regular uses a special Linux (RH) virtual machine for management, but again for it the vmkernel is not Linux. Busybox is used with ESXi for console access, but it is running on top of the vmkernel.

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rsa911
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎08-09-2008 08:07 AM

as the proliant bios support switching the boot controller, you can use this workaround to boot from one set of disk attached to controller A and another attached to controller B

you can find second hand smart arrays to do the job

anyway, I'm not sure you will get any decent perf with a DL380 G2 running ESXi , the cpus in there are still P3 Xeons

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