New install to diskless DL380G8 - How to?

[BrendanMarmont]

Hi, we have new Gen8 diskless servers, no DVD just an onboard 4GB scratch disk. I'm just wondering what is best practice to install v5? Do we present a LUN with the .iso and boot from SAN, USB? Can we load the image to SD and install from there??

Cheers for the heads up!

Brendan

[Kasraeian · Accepted solution]

If there are few hosts (about five) you can install (interactive) VMware ESXi on the USB/SD placed in the server and as I checked HP DL380 G8 supports both internal USB and SD, so they can be used for installation.

If you have lots of hosts and there's chance that other diskless servers would be bought from now on, you can use "VMware Autodeploy".

Here are media options for booting the ESXi installer.

Installation options/guide can be found on the "vSphere Installation and Setup Guide" document on "VMware vSphere Documentation" page.

[Josh26]

Having done a tonne of these recently, the easiest thing is to mount the installer DVD over iLO and install on the SD card.

You did get iLO license right? At some point, you'll want either that or a DVD drive. Even if you get around this with TFTP boot, what happens when you want to do a Firmware Update DVD run?

[BrendanMarmont]

Got it, using "hpusbfw v2.2.3exe format to fat32, run unetbootin-windows-575.exe, point  to image, doesn't boot, error "menu.c32: not a COM32R image", just hit the TAB at boot:, type install and boom, hypervisor time

We have iLO, but not advanced, so each time it boots into the OS, the task kills itself and the DVD drive dismounts.

I've also tried...

syslinux -mfa, extracting .iso, rename isolinux.cfg - syslinux.cfg - Doesn't boot, it just reboots

hpusbfw v2.2.3exe format to fat32, run unetbootin-windows-575.exe, point to image, doesn't boot, error "menu.c32: not a COM32R image"

Any other ideas? Must be missing something here!