vSphere - 35

Thomas Bishop figured out how to automatically let your ESX 3i server start in the interactive shell mode. Well that’s great but what to do when we are logged in. Do we have the same environment as the service console or are there less or new features? I captured a list of commands you could use in the ESX 3i interactive shell. Have fun with it and use at your own risk.

When you are going to create you own software and want to connect to the VCserver the MOB is your friend.  With the Managed Object Browser (https://server/mob) you have the opportunity to browse trough every object you can address from within the SDK.  Since I’m involved in building software (Virtual Machine MKS Client), I was  wondering if there are any new objects in the ESX 3i MOB, and there are. I found a lot of new references, but there where two of them who triggered my attention; the FileManager and the  VirtualDiskManager. Those two I haven’t noticed before and they seem to deal with files and disks.

Viktor van den Berg (the professional photographer) created a nice ESX 3i presentation. It’s in Dutch but  if you are not familiar with this language, you should still take a look at the really nice screenshot’s. Viktor posted the article on the Dutch Vmug.

Thomas Bishop AKA Tommy over at "Scale The Mind" created two real cool YouTube videos. On the first one he shows ESX 3i running within VMware Fusion. The second one shows the ESX 3i interactive shell.  Thomas and I are running parallel with the discovery of new ESX 3i features, we both found out how to run ESX 3i in a virtual machine and we also discovered some of the additional commands you could use during the bootstrap.  Thomas about the interactive shell : "The fact that it is possible to easily get an interactive shell with ESX 3i is going to prove to be a valuable resource in learning about the internals of it.  It looks like it is heavily dependent on a number of open source packages (no surprise there)". J Hicks joked about all the ESX 3i information and stated that we have ESX 3i running on an iPhone in no time. ;-)

When I was stumbling through the VMTN Discussion Forums I found a thread about  VMware ESX 3i Server. One little post from Olivier Crémel   over at VMware caught my attention. It’s dealing with the boot options you can use during the initial startup of ESX 3i. When you press <SHIFT> o during the bootstrap you can put in additional commands. The only command Olivier Crémel   revealed was the nousbBoot option but there must be more. Finally I opened the ESX 3i kernel in a hex editor and found  the complete list. Some of these commands have great potential.

maxPCPUS serialPort overrideSerialPortAddr baudRate
fakeNUMAnodes cpuCellSize netNumPortsets netNumGPBuffers
netMaxPCPUPktCacheSize  netPktNumSlabSizes netPktHeapMinSize
netPktHeapMaxSize storageHeapMinSize storageHeapMaxSize
passthruMem BOOTIF BOOTUUID  clockMultiplierMayVaryPerNode
memmapMaxPhysicalMemMB acpiDbgLevel nouseNUMAInfo
nompsIntRouting noforceCRS noACPI noexecutePOST 
nopageSharing nomemCheckEveryWord nohyperthreading
nologicalApicId nodumpDiag  norealNMI nologOnScreen
nonetESX2LegacyMode  nonetPktBufUseSlab nonetPanicBadDevOpen
nonetUseProc nonetUseMemcpyNt noioapic nopassthruEnabled
novga64 nosmallFontForTTY noauditMode noshell nopasswdReset
nousbBoot nouwSwap nobusSpeedMayVary noclockMultiplierMayVary
noassumeCommonBusClock noassumePerNodeBusClock 
nobusSpeedMayVaryPerNode  notimerEnableTSC notimerForceTSC
notimerEnableHPET notimerEnableACPI notimerEnableMPMC
nomemmapStressHighBitMPNs nopanicOnVmkernelAbort noconsole
noxapicAMDDetect noxapicForce nocheckCPUIDLimit novmkKeyboard
novmkTerminals nouseTSCForCPUHz nodebugBreak nologSynchronous
nofastHzEstimate buddyPhysicalMemoryDebugStruct
noclockMultiplierMayVaryPerNode
nobuddyPhysicalMemoryDebugStruct BootConfig_LogOptions
BootUser

Since my memory stick is broken I had to find out how I could carry on with exploring the new futures of ESX 3i. I was lucky; one of my fellow VMware trainers was willing enough to provide me with an image of his USB stick. What I did is use an existing virtual machine and added a one gigabyte hard disk. I downloaded Selfimage and placed the ESX 3i image on the new disk. I disconnected the disk and created a new virtual machine. I have chosen for “other Linux�? with one gigabyte memory and two network adapters and connected the ready made “one gigabyte disk�? as an existing disk. The last step was powering on the new VM. You see the result in the screen dump.