Wednesday, January 4, 2017

20170104 Virtual Machines

My very first pet ghost computer!
Tonight, I:

  • Set up a brand-new-in-box Brix Pro i7 to run ESXi,  a virtual machine host OS
  • 'Hacked' (is this even hacking? I don't know) an ESXi customizer program to not flag Windows 10 as an non-modern Windows operating system (it thought it was pre-XP...)
    • For this, I edited the .cmd (in Notepad) and found the function that was messing with it
    • I changed the if statement within the function to not flag an error if the version of Windows was not 9.? (isn't this the whole joke about why Windows 10 happened?!)
    • I saved the file, and it worked!
    • I felt clever
  • Re-compiled a custom ESXi .iso to make it play nice with the Brix Pro
    • Some issues with the HDD and the Network Adapter
    • Required two extra packages, and a lot of searching around
  • Made a bootable USB of the .iso
  • Installed the .iso to the Brix Pro
  • Successfully loaded the web client in order to install machines
    • Experimented a little, creating and destroying VMs
  • SSH'd into the host machine
  • Downloaded Linux Mint 18 to attempt installation of a VM from .iso
    • Made another bootable USB
    • Created a Linux VM
    • Couldn't get the VM to see the bootable USB in host machine
    • Uploaded Mint.iso to datastore
    • Gave VM a CD drive that was directly linked to the datastore .iso file
    • It worked! It is pictured up at the top of this post
    • Installed using the prompt pictured above
Quite an adventure, and a lot of fun! Total time, end to end, was 3 hours.

Software acquired:
  • ESXi Customizer (to re-compile the .iso)
  • VMware PowerCLI (I ended up not using this)
  • Universal USB Installer
  • VMware vSphere
  • Putty
  • Linux Mint 18
Thanks to Matthew Wegner for the inspiration and coaching.

No comments:

Post a Comment