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
• Learned how to use SSH
• Installed a script via SSH
• Thank you to Prolved.com
• This will come in useful later...
• 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.