VMware ESXi – Free memory limits corrected

Well, a coworker of mine asked me about this. Since I didn’t know (yeah, I don’t know everything) I went to my trusted friend – Google – and searched for it. There seems to be a lot of confusion about this, so I thought I’d clarify this.

I ended up putting a license to one of my hosts in vCenter.

VMware ESXi Free Edition  Memory Limit

 

Yeah well, the host has a bit more memory than the allowed 32GB vRAM per Socket (the host has two sockets) – thus you’re allowed to have 64GB RAM if your host has two sockets.

PXEBoot the VMware ESXi installer

Some of you may know, that VMware released vSphere 4.0 Update 1 yesterday. I took this as a reason, to finally wrap my head around booting the VMware ESXi installer from my PXE/TFTP box. Since VMware was kind enough to provide (a somewhat worthless) document, that explains how to extract the necessary files on Windows. But that quite doesn’t work with Linux — and VMware just states that you should be using mount and it’s option offset.

Luckily there are smart people around. Cameron shows exactly as to how you’d mount the dd-image. If the dd-image is mounted, you just need to copy over cim.vgz, license.tgz, oem.tgz, sys.vgz, vmk.gz and vmkboot.gz. After doing so, you should add a section to your pxelinux.cfg that kinda looks like this:

Just make sure, everything following APPEND and before IAPPEND is in a single line.