Start ESX or ESXi Guests at Boot

I've had to do this before and always forget, so here goes.

1. Launch the VIC
2. Click on the server icon (not the guest icon)
3. Click the "Configuration" tab
4. Click on Virtual Machine startup/shutdown
5. Click on "Properties"
6. Click on "allow virtual machines to start and stop with the system"
7. Click on the guest you want to start automatically and then click "move up" until it's in the 'Automatic Start Up' section
8. Rinse, repeat for any other guests OS's

The last few steps are not very intuitive, but you get the idea once you've done it a few times. Thanks to Merrick for reminding me which tab these settings were on. I had to do this a few months ago and had forgotten.

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.