Studying for VCP - Need help with understanding Service Console / Partitioning / VMKernel.

[jbhifi]

Hi.

I'm currently studying for VCP and need some help understanding some basic principles around ESX. From what I undertstand, The linux kernel is loaded first at boot up and this is responsible for booting the VMkernel. Ok, no problems there Next, as I understand it, the Linux kernel somehow becomes the first VM running on the previously loaded VMkernel. This is where I get a bit confused.

Firstly, How does the linux kernel go from running on physical hardware at boot up to running in a VMDK as a VM ?

Secondly, how does all the partitioning work around this? From what I undertstand, the service console ends up in a VMDK which is carved up into partitions such as /boot, /var/log etc.... Obviously this has to reside on VMFS somewhere, so does the VMkernel mount some VMFS storage for this?

I hope this makes sense. I've spent most of my time around ESXi so this is a little foreign to me.

Cheers.

[beyondvm]

As of 4.0 the startup sequence is different.  The ESX kernel is booted basically directly and then starts the service console VM ontop of the running VMkernel.  I think you are getting the boot sequence confused with 3.x which is as you described, I hope this clears things up!