unattended esxi

[brugh]

is there a quick startup guide to unattended 3i installations? i'd like to even skip the 5 step manual installation and do it all automagically

[Formatter]

I did see one in these posts but it was a long time ago, try searching for it here maybe.

[brugh]

i did but didnt find anything..

[Formatter]

Try this or

[Formatter]

http://communities.vmware.com/click.jspa?searchID=3484572&objectType=2&objectID=293227

Look here maybe this will assist

[Formatter]

Try This

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=290187&#290187

[brugh]

that's not exactly what i'm looking for. i know how to do unattended installations. i built the EDA for that purpose (). i was looking for a way to do that with ESXi too though. but one of the links you posted pointed me in the right direction. i'll write a few tests soon to see if it works. thanks.

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

If you haven't found them already, you might want to look at some of the documents posted by lberc.

[brugh]

those help thanks!

[admin]

Glad to hear that at least one person read them B-). Start with this doc . -l

[brugh2]

they're a great help in understanding how the esxi installation process works

i got a setup where it boots through PXE, installs (manually) and after a reboot i have a bare esxi server. so far so good, but i'm still missing something in the process as to where to exactly start customizing. i pass my custom.tgz and see it unpacked correctly in the busybox environment. but i'm unsure how to procede:

• when the host boots, i press alt-f1 and login. i see the e1000 module loaded (have 2 nics in the host) but i dont seem to have network connectivity. is it supposed to? how do i configure it?

• i guess i could rewrite the /usr/lib/vmware/somethingWelcome.py to unload the lpf and qla drivers, then find a harddisk and dump the visor image on it. seems a bit eerie though. are there hooks or other scripting parts that allow for a supported way to pass (unattended) configuration parameters to the installer?

• i added some parameter settings after vmkernel.gz on the append line. but i'm not sure how to use those in the script i put in /etc/rc.local.d. what's the secret here?

• customization of the host can't start until the dd image is put on the harddisk. again this would require a rewrite of the installer .py scripts which i would rather not do (mainly for compatibility reasons). is there a supported way to write to the newly written esxi host disk?

• i see you use a midwive to automatically configure a new esxi server. but as far as i can see, it starts configuring the busybox environment. this would not change the esxi host. but i'm sure it changes the host, not the installer. but what am i missing here? this would probably be a clue to how my setup would have to work also.

any help would be greatly appreciated!