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StephenMoll
Expert
Expert
‎09-10-2010 05:04 AM

Installing ESXi 4.1 from USB stick WITH HP Offline Bundle

We have an environment where HP DL380G6 servers are used to support small projects on a short term basis.

Before the next project the machines are wiped and reinstalled from scratch using a procedure which needs to be documented and baselined, so that we can be sure that the machines are always the same.

The deployment unfortunately is run in isolation so using vCenter Server to automatically deploy them is not an option.

At the moment the procedure requires the ESXi 4.1 base install to be run from a USB CD-drive, followed by temporarily connecting the the machine to a a Windows box installed with vMA, to installed the HP specific parts, a couple of bundles (The HP Offline bundle and the HP NMI Sourcing Driver bundle).

I am aware that it is possible to move the ESXi installer to a bootable USB memory stick, which would be an improvement in itself, but I was wondering if there is a way to include the HP bundles as well, and create a single step installation process?

Is this possible?

Cheers

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StephenMoll
Expert
Expert
‎09-28-2010 08:48 AM

My question was answered by HP relaeasing a ESXi 4.1 build already customised for Proliant servers.

The techniques were already well established on how to transfer an ESXi installer from CD-ROM to bootable USB memory stick, but there is a 'gotcha' in there unfortunately.

When the installer is run from a USB memory stick, there has to be a ks.cfg file specified. Unfortunately this seems complex, especially for me to setup, and I therefore haven't been able to get it to work. I can get it to work alright for installing the hypervisor to the RAID array in the host, but that is not what we want to do. We want to install the hypervisor to an SD-card on the motherboard, and have the entire RAID array as the VMFS datastore. I haven't worked out how to do this yet.

Is there a way to see how the ks.cfg file is setup when doing manual installs from the CD-ROM? It would be good to see, as we can install it the way we want from CD-ROM going through the GUI.

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