Fun with VMware ESXi

Day one of playing with bare metal hypervisors, and I'm already having a blast.

I decided to try ESXi first, since it was the closest relative to what I'm running right now.

Straight out of the box, I run into my first error. I'm installing on a Dell Poweredge 1950 server. The CD boots into an interesting initialization sequence. The screen turns a featureless black, and there are no details as to what is going on behind the scenes. The only indication that the machine isn't frozen is a slowly incrementing progress bar at the bottom. After around 20 minutes (I'm guessing the time it takes to read and decompress an entire installation CD into memory), the screen changes to a menu asking me to hit R if I want to repair, or Enter if I want to install. I want to install, so I hit Enter. Nothing happens, so I hit enter again. And again. And again. It takes a few more times before I realize that the "numlock" light is off. Curious, I hit numlock and it doesn't respond.

Awesome.

I unplug and replug the keyboard in. Nothing. Move it to the front port. Nothing. I reboot and come back to my desk to research. Apparently, I'm not alone. Those accounts are from 2008. I downloaded this CD an hour ago, and it's 3.5 U4 (the most current 3.5x release). It is supposed to have support on the PE1950, but if the keyboard doesn't even work, I have my doubts.

Lots of people have suggested using a PS2 keyboard as the accepted workaround, but in a similar tone to most of my problem/solution options, this server has no PS2 ports.

I'm downloading ESX v4 now. I'll update with how it goes, no doubt.

Dedicated ESXi: Server or something else?

Christopher Hoff, over at Rational Security discussed an interesting idea last week about VMWare's ESXi. One of his readers theorized that maybe ESXi-based servers shouldn't be considered as servers in some cases, but more like quasi-blade-chassis, since they essentially provide the same functionality.

They're exploiting the idea for auditing, but since I'm really too small for that sort of thing right now, I don't have to worry about that, much. I also don't worry about ESXi much, since even though it's free, the Virtual Infrastructure to really use it costs thousands of dollars.

I just figured I'd throw this out there to see what you all thought of it.

[Update] Fixed broken link. Thanks DDressler!