Initial Setup Possibility

[cyschubert]

Before I begin, a little about my background. I'm a VMware/Linux admin and a FreeBSD kernel developer.

My current setup is a couple of FreeBSD machines with multiple FreeBSD operating systems on partitioned disks. Both machines are essentially headless (heads on KVM but remote access only via serial console server).

The plan is to carve out a partition in each for ESXi and boot the existing FreeBSD O/S's under ESXi from the existing physical partitions. (Physical partitions are a mix of UFS2 and ZFS).

My questions are,

1. Is ESXi able to use a serial console instead of VGA?

2. Can I set up ESXi without an VMFS for VMs and use the existing physical partitions?

3. At times I may need to boot the bare metal machine into FreeBSD itself.

[fpineau]

1. Here's a document about setting up serial console:

vSphere Documentation Center

2. When you're referring to using the existing partitions, I presume that you want to present them as storage to a VM?  You can add a raw data store to ESXi and then present that storage to a client VM.  This document talks about RDM via fiber or iSCSI, but you could present an NFS store as well (although it won't be RDM, it will be NFS).

vSphere Documentation Center

3.  I'm not sure what your question is here.  Are you wanting to dual-boot ESXi and FreeBSD?  There shouldn't be a reason why you can't but I can't imagine why you'd want to.