Few notes on the home ESX box

I'm now running ESX within Workstation. It connects via a separate Gb NIC to the iSCSI switch on to Starwind 2TB imagefile. On the other Gb NIC is the LAN/Service console.

Note if you want to use NFS to host your ISOs on the iSCSI server: Completely doable, but if you find yourself getting 'NFS Error: Unable to Mount filesystem', it's probably because you either don't have the NFS Client firewall rule enabled, or you haven't added a VMkernel to your LAN vSwitch. I just added one with an IP address on the LAN's subnet. Did that, works like a charm now!

Oh yeah, you need root access enabled in the NFS properties on the server that is hosting your NFS share.

I also had the NUMA CPU error on booting up ESX4 inside Workstation 7. The following link fixed it: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/244537 (the post by dmadden)

I've since installed ESXi since this will be a permanent install (also got the NUMA CPU error). Oddly enough, NFS works fine, but iSCSI refuses to see the iSCSI targets. I can vmkping the target IP.

Decided to reboot, found out that there is no shutdown command! See here: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1013193

Thank goodness for the fast reboot times of ESXi.


Some ESXi commands related to iSCSI:

esxcli nmp device list
esxcfg-swiscsi -e
esxcfg-swiscsi -s


Update: I'm just retarded. My iSCSI issues lay in the fact that I'm going through another adapter, courtesy of VMware Workstation. Another adapter, that I configured with an IP address. You know...the same IP address I set on the ESX virtual machine.

At any rate, I've run into more issues...whereas before ESX would boot my old VMs, I now cannot create a x64 VM at all, due to VT somehow not working correctly.

Update 2: Actually...if I'd just read the release notes...it says explicitly that you can only run 32-bit guests inside ESX inside Workstation. Sheesh. Well don't I feel silly. First time release notes have been worth something! I'll probably just run everything as VMs in Workstation at this point.

Update 3: Yeah, this won't work. Can't connect to the iSCSI network now! Dagnabbit. I am now officially out of luck. Can't install the 8TB array in this machine even if I wanted to...I'd need a board with 1 x8 and 2 x16 slots. Honest to goodness.

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