I’ve been using VMWare ESX for several years now in my company with great success. It made things really easier. Of course it’s not for free, but it’s really worth the money you pay for it. So it was really a surprise when I recognized that there is a new and free VMWare ESXi for download available from the VMWare homepage. Sounds interesting, OK let’s try it.

Just Download

So I went to the VMWare homepage and downloaded the ESXi ISO install image. After the short registration which is needed for download you will automatically receive the license key via e-mail. For installation the license key is not needed, ESXi will work fo 60 days after installation.

Installation

After writing the ISO to a CD-ROM and booting the PC from it I reconized that ESXi did not detect my good old 20 GB PATA hard disc. After putting a 160 GB SATA disc in and booting again my hard disc was detected correct and ESXi installed perfectly. But after first boot no IP adsress was assigned (0.0.0.0). After some Google research in found out that my onboard network card was not detected and that ESXi currently mainly supports Intel network cards. Fortunatly I found a old Intel Etherexpress 10/100  PCI card in the company, put it in my desktop and booted again. And oh surprise, the NIC was detected and a IP address was assigned via DHCP.

First Contact

After typing the IP address of the ESXi machine in the browser the VMWare Infrastructure Client can be downloaded and installed. New virtual machines are installed, managed and so on using the Infrastructure Client via Network. My first plan was to install Debian Etch from the net-install CD-ROM, but ESXi did not detect my CD-ROM (maybe I’ve disconnected the cable while installing the Intel NIC card, not sure). But it doesn’t matter because you can easily mount the CD-ROM of your client where Infrastructure Client is running or also just mount an ISO image. It worked and Debian Etch was installed. To check the performance on my Intel 2x3GHz 2GB RAM desktop I added Windows 2000 as second virtual machine. It also installed without problems. Very nice!

It’s Working

So far I’ve recognized command line tools like vcbMounter and vcbRestore are not available on the ESXi host like on ESX hosts which can be used for automated backups. But I’ll need to further investigate ESXi, for now it’s already running within a very short time – amazing. And it helps to warm up my living room when the 2xGHz desktop machine is running the whole day…

Screenshots

Doing a backup of a virtual machine can be done using a single command line call:

vcbMounter -a name:"Virtual-Machine-1" -r "/path/to/backup/Virtual-Machine-1"

Ok, your vm named “Virtual-Machine-1″ will now be backuped to the given path. The directory is generated from vcbMounter. The next time you will run vcbMounter it will complain that the directory already exists, so you will have to delete the directory every time before you start the backup:

rm -rf "/path/to/backup/Virtual-Machine-1"
vcbMounter -a name:"Virtual-Machine-1" -r "/path/to/backup/Virtual-Machine-1"

But there is another problem which will cause vcbMounter to complain: For every backup vcbMounter generates a snapshot and will not remove it after backup. What we need is to delete the snapshot before we backup:

vmware-cmd "/vmfs/volumes/storage1/Virtual-Machine-1.vmx" removesnapshots

rm -rf "/path/to/backup/Virtual-Machine-1"

vcbMounter -a name:"Virtual-Machine-1" -r "/path/to/backup/Virtual-Machine-1"

We delete the snapshots for a given virtual machine using “vmware-cmd” and removesnapshots. vmware-cmd needs the path to your .vmx file of the virtual machine. It’s usually stored in /vmfs/volumes/…

vcbMounter does not expect the path to the .vmx. It only needs the name of your virtual machine.

Doing the backup on a NFS mount is also possible. You need to deactive the VMWare ESX firewall and can mount e.g. using “mount -t smbfs”.