For a VMWare Horizon View POC in our environment we recieved an old HP DL380 G5 with nice specs: 2 phy. Quad-CPUs, 32GB RAM, RAID-Controller with write Cache, and quite everything redundant.
As SSDs are getting more and more beneficial, we bought 4 Kingston 300v SSD with 480GB of space and installed them in the OEM cases of the HP disks. Yes, this works!
For our tests this hardware is more than enough.
First of all I googled around to see if there was already someone who tried to install ESXi 6.0 on an old DL380 G5 as it isn’t a supported hardware. I’ve found this article from a guy that was having problems with the HP custom iso installing it on a G5 server:
http://htluo.blogspot.ch/2015/05/esxi-60-on-hp-dl380-g5.html
So I decided to have a try with the original ISO. After booting the Image I received an error message saying that I’m using unsupported hardware. Thank’s for the information but I know this already 😉 You can accept the information an run-through.
After the installation completed, I connected to the ESXi server with the VIClient. Everything looked well with the exception of the hardware. There was no hardware listed.
This is because the HP drivers are not integrated into the image. So I downloaded the needed VIBs from the HP VIB repository and installed them (the text in the brackets is not part of the command). For those who don’t know what a VIB is, have a look on this article:
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 |
cd /tmp wget http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/latest/esxi-600-bundles/hp-esxi6.0uX-bundle-2.3-16.zip (CIM Providers for Monitoring) wget http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/latest/esxi-600-bundles/hp-nmi-esxi6.0-bundle-2.3.14.zip (NMI No masakble driver Driver - Insight Management Log) wget http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/latest/esxi-600-bundles/hp-ams-esxi6.0-bundle-10.2.0-8.zip (Agentless Management Service (AMS) - limited limited HP CIM Providers - only used for vCenter) wget http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/latest/esxi-600-bundles/hp-HPUtil-esxi6.0-bundle-2.3-10.zip (Utilitys like ILO CMDs, RAID Controller CMDs) |
Before I could install the VIBs I had to put the ESX server in maintenance mode:
|
1 |
vim-cmd /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter |
If you receive a message like this, this is because there are VMs running on the system:
|
1 2 |
Enter maintenance mode mode failed 'vim.Task:haTask-ha-host-vim.HostSystem.enterMaintenanceMode-32575' |
So I had to check what VMs are running on the system and stop them. You can do this with the VI Client or with the shell:
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
esxcli vm process list vcenter1 <strong>World ID: 36637</strong> Process ID: 0 VMX Cartel ID: 36636 UUID: 56 4d e9 93 4c 25 5b ff-27 a5 96 07 bc 35 52 75 Display Name: vcenter1 Config File: /vmfs/volumes/55e6de01-316d5c5d-d9ae-00237d251942/vcenter1/vcenter1.vmx view1 <strong>World ID: 36956</strong> Process ID: 0 VMX Cartel ID: 36955 UUID: 56 4d 2c 80 b8 a7 43 be-67 57 83 65 83 b3 22 ba Display Name: view1 Config File: /vmfs/volumes/55e6de01-316d5c5d-d9ae-00237d251942/view1/view1.vmx |
Now that we have the world id of the VM (similar to the PID), we can stop the VMs with those commands:
|
1 2 |
esxcli vm process kill --type=soft --world-id=36637 esxcli vm process kill --type=soft --world-id=36956 |
Retry now to run the enter maintenance mode command and check the state with this command:
|
1 |
vim-cmd /hostsvc/hostsummary | grep inMaintenanceMode |
The output should look similar to this:
|
1 |
inMaintenanceMode = <strong>true</strong>, |
As you can see, the ESX server is now in maintenance mode. So i could begin with the installation of the VIBs. For this I used the esxcli “software vib install”. It is important that you write the full path to the VIB file. Otherwise the command ends with an error:
|
1 2 3 4 |
esxcli software vib install -d /tmp/hp-nmi-esxi6.0-bundle-2.3.14.zip esxcli software vib install -d /tmp/hp-HPUtil-esxi6.0-bundle-2.3-10.zip esxcli software vib install -d /tmp/hp-ams-esxi6.0-bundle-10.2.0-8.zip esxcli software vib install -d /tmp/hp-esxi6.0uX-bundle-2.3-16.zip |
The output should look similar to this:
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 |
Installation Result Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective. Reboot Required: true VIBs Installed: Hewlett-Packard_bootbank_hpnmi_600.2.3.14-2159203 VIBs Removed: VIBs Skipped: |
As you can see in the message, the system requires a reboot after the installation. So we can now reboot the system with the reboot command.
After the reboot we can connect us with the VIClient to the esx server and now we should see all the hardware and sensors installed on the system:
So then, I wish you happy virtualizing with your new ESXi server and do not forget to configure the rest such as ntp, ssh, portgroups, vm settings and so on.
P.S. this server is running now about 4 weeks without any problems or PSOD