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chjohnst
Contributor
Contributor

Serial Console Support

Is there serial console support for building ESX3 servers? It seems no matter what settings I use to build the off of a pxe boot the serial console is disabled once the build process starts (yes I have everything setup correctly as its identical to all the 5000 other hosts ive built here for my company).

Right now the only process I can use is the iLO on an HP system or to sick a KVM to the box.

Thx

Chris

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john_peterson
Contributor
Contributor

I have the same need (installing VMWare via serial port). Since this thread is a few months old I thought I'd ask again if anyone figured this out?

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--g
Contributor
Contributor

I don't think this is possible without a kvm device. Unfortunately it seems vmware

doesn't have the kernel option "CONFIG_SERIAL_CONSOLE=y" in their vmlinuz

install image. This option does seem to be in the installed product though.

Perhaps vmware would like to release another vmlinuz and supporting

files (initrd.img, netstg2.img etc...) for the install. Or in the short term release

the kernel tree they use for the install so we can try to roll our own install image.

--g

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dtdionne
Contributor
Contributor

wow...and i thought i was in bad shape...

Hey Paul....Paul btw is the bomb so take it easy, i dont wana have to break out any smack down's Smiley Happy

I came here today to see if there was a above board supported serial console enabling feature in ESX3...but based on this thread, it looks like the answer is NO....so here's what you do!

Edit the /boot/grub/grub.conf file and add the following to the end of the kernel option for whichever esx boot label you would like a serial console in:

console=ttyS1,19200 console=tty0

Then add the following to your /etc/inittab (my esx server spotted the changes i made to the grub.conf and i believe that it was kudzu that made these changes to my inittab file but i think thats cause i booted into service console mode)

co:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS1 19200 - or - you could just boot into the service console and let it add it for you, i had to rebuild my esx server so the line above was taken from a FC6 server. And of course substitue ttyS1 with where ever you serial port is, mine is com 2 so its ttyS1, com 1 would be ttyS0, and be sure to set your baud rate, mine is 19200 but the standard is 9600.

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evilninja
Contributor
Contributor

Hah! The text parameter did it for me! I'm installing on a Sun v40z, where serial console access via ILOM is possible, but the ESX installer hung every time just after init, as if init forgot to start on ttyS0. Had all the parameters in place, I thought:

label VMWARE
menu label VMware ESX Interactive
kernel vmware/vmlinuz
append initrd=vmware/initrd.img mem=512M vmkopts=debugLogToSerial:1 console=ttyS0,115200n8 askmedia

But yeah, the "text" parameter was missing 🙂 Thanks!

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