Creating a VMDK file indepedent of a Guest VM

So you've got your ESX or ESXi server set up with a bunch of guests. What if you wanted to share a drive between them independent of any particular guest os? You can use the command line tool vmkfstools to achieve this. Let's say you wanted to create a new virtual disk 3GB. Open up your command line and change to the directory you want your new virtual drive located in. Use the command:

vmkfstools -c 3000M ./file.vmdk

That's it. Now you can mount this as a drive on any of your VM guests. This is a good idea if you have a bunch of tools or installs you use on a variety of systems. Unfortunately, you cannot share the vmdk file on multiple guest vm's at the same time.

Resources:
http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1348873,00.html
http://www.esxguide.com/esx/content/view/18/25/

Open Source [Free] Disk Partitioning Tool

PartedMagic - so very cool! Patrick Verner and his development team have created a really awesome FREE tool for manipulating drive partitions. A big thank you to Patrick and his team for creating this utility. Works great for growing NTFS disk partitions in the guest once you've grown them in your ESX (or other hypervisor) environment.

Super Secret ESXi Command Line Access

Even though they tell you it doesn't exist and they want you to use the RCLI tools, you can get to the command line interface on ESXi. Here's how:

1. Alt+F1
2. Type: unsupported (you won't see anything) and press enter
3. You should see the support warning and then the prompt for your password
4. Enter your password

Jon Warburton has more information about this and how to enable ssh on his blog.

Converting NRG disk images to ISO using DD

I use Nero for a lot of things under windows. Unfortunately, Nero does not allow you to create disk images as standard ISO files - not to mention I have a lot of old NRG image files laying around. Well, ESX doesn't know what to do with NRG image files, so I needed to convert them to ISO. I found 2 solutions:

1) MY SOLUTION: Use DD

dd if=image.nrg of=image.iso bs=4096 skip=75

2) Use nrg2iso from Gregory Kakanosky

Mihai Criveti has more information about this on his blog about this and some responses from people who disagree with his solution. Those people can suck it, it worked fine for me!

ESXi Windows XP Install: scsi disk drivers

In setting up a new ESXi (3.5.0) server I came across the issue of not having the BUSLogic driver or the LSI Logic driver when attempting to install windows xp pro as a guest os. I was getting that "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer" error message.

You've got several options:

1) MY SOLUTION: Download the BusLogic driver disk directly from VMWare: http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp.

2) Download the LSI Drivers from the LSI website and make your own .flp image.

3) Slipstream a copy of windows XP installer to include either of these drivers using something like nLite (good god, that software is AWESOME!)

Vincent Vlieghe has much more detailed instructions on his blog. These instructions work for both ESX and ESXi.

Everyone's got a blog - why should we read yours?

Don't. This blog is for me - so I can remember how to do stuff. I've given up on writing things down, making paper notes. Inevitably those get lost and I'm sure at some point this website might go away - but until then I'm hoping I'll be able to document stuff I've done (IT or otherwise) so I can come back to it and remember how (or why) I did something. Secondary to my own selfish desire to keep ideas for posterity, maybe this blog will get indexed and my ramblings might help someone else solve a similar issue.