New Lab box, Finally! hp N36L with ESXi 4.1

YES! After really long time, I finally decided to go for it.

I was looking for something really particular:

a) small size (mac mini or shuttle like)

b) fan less or very little noise

c) low power consumption

After a little bit of research, several folks were talking about this new micro server compatible with ESXi out of the box, the HP N36L microserver.

I went for it, it comes with an useless 1GB ram which now I use it use it as dart!, so I got it working with the max of ram which is 8GB with 2x4GB Kingston KVR133/PC3-10600.

did I mention it does not come with optic unit? yeah pity, so I had to make a cheap USB Stick bootable with ESXi 4.1 in order to install the server, here is where the pain begins...

I looked at few tutorials out there and none of them worked, on top of that I ran in every single problem you can imagine:

• USB Stick didn't boot
• when It booted it didn't recognize the kickstart file
• when I solved the kickstart file configuration issue It didn't see the hardisks to install (
• error: /tmp/ks.cfg: line 6: auto part --firstdisk specified, but no suitable disk was found)
• then I managed to solved that and....
• It didn't work because I was now getting an "md5 sum mismatch error", which by the way I solved re-copying by *zillion times the 4,1 files into the USB Stick.
• So I did it! I got ESXi 4.1 working, and this is the log how i created the USB installer stick:

I didn't have any other Linux box other than the actual backtrack 4r2, its based on ubuntu, so anyways:

root@bt:~# fdisk /dev/sdb1

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 31999.

There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,

and could in certain setups cause problems with:

1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)

2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs

(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): d

Partition number (1-4): 1

Command (m for help): d

Partition number (1-4): 2

Command (m for help): d

Partition number (1-4): 3

Command (m for help): d

Selected partition 4

Command (m for help): d

No partition is defined yet!

Command (m for help): n

Command action

e extended

p primary partition (1-4)

p

Partition number (1-4): 1

First cylinder (1-31999, default 1):

Using default value 1

Last cylinder, +cylinders or +size{K,M,G} (1-31999, default 31999):

Using default value 31999

Command (m for help): a

Partition number (1-4): 1

Command (m for help): t

Selected partition 1

Hex code (type L to list codes): b

Changed system type of partition 1 to b (W95 FAT32)

Command (m for help): w

The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 22: Invalid argument.

The kernel still uses the old table.

The new table will be used at the next reboot.

WARNING: If you have created or modified any DOS 6.x

partitions, please see the fdisk manual page for additional

information.

Syncing disks.

root@bt:~# umount /dev/sdb1

root@bt:~# mkfs.vfat -n BOOT -F 32 /dev/sdb1

mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)

root@bt:~# syslinux -s /dev/sdb1

root@bt:~# dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb

0+1 records in

0+1 records out

404 bytes (404 B) copied, 0.0147531 s, 27.4 kB/s

root@bt:~# mount /dev/sdb1 /root/usb

root@bt:~# cp -r /media/cdrom0/* /root/usb/

root@bt:~# cd /root/usb/

root@bt:~/usb# rm isolinux.bin

root@bt:~/usb# mv isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg

This box can manage easily a couple of VMs of low CPU needs, I'll probably get XBMC or freeNAS running besides some *nix boxes to play around with.

as FPSrussia! says..... as usual, have nice day! hahahaha.