Comments on: Notes on How to perform a scripted install of VMware ESX 4.0

By: newguyvmware

newguyvmware — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:52:33 +0000

hi, can you please advise how to prompt for the vmotion ip address (similar to the way in which you prompt for fqdn and sc ip)
and then use that variable to set and configure vmotion in the post section?

By: newguyvmware

newguyvmware — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:46:32 +0000

hi…i am having some difficultly understand the “MAIN PROGRAM” section of your script – can you please explain this part especially where the postinstall.tgz if being picked up from via ftp and what is in there.

can i not simply include my commands which i use after installing esx in this section such as adding users, creating port groups, vswitches etc???

your help and response would be great!

By: Tim Lefler

Tim Lefler — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:33:29 +0000

Sam,

No I did not try vlanid= in the boot loader. Please let us know if this works for you. Would definitely make a huge improvement to my process.

Thanks for replying,
Tim

By: S Brown

S Brown — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:45:09 +0000

I’m wondering about your problem, stated “the ESX kickstart/syslinux kernel used for the ESX 4.0 installation does not support VLAN trunking”. Did you try the –vlanid=… option in the bootloader?

By: Tim Lefler

Tim Lefler — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:02:04 +0000

Sam,

As far as iSCSI is concerned the script above will work without modification. I collect the information during the install portion but don’t put it to use until my postinstall.sh script is executed. I setup stuff unique to my environment using this script and did not post the contents since it is customized heavily for my particular environment. If you don’t have a postinstall.sh or use one that doesn’t reference the environment variables for iSCSI then the information collected will just be ignored.

I have not tried this process with 4.0 update 1 as of yet so I’m not sure why it would be writing to “ks.cfg”. Have you tried it with ks.cfg on a USB device instead of burned to the CD?

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:22:17 +0000

The First Post
Tim I am Getting an Error writing to ks.cfg
Writing to ks.cfg failed with Track Back
systeminstall.py

Have you seen this in the 4.0.1 Builds
I will try to get you a creen shot of the Error

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:06:44 +0000

Can you help me remove the iscsi from the script. We don,t use ISCSI AT THE present time.

By: Tim Lefler%

Tim Lefler% — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:27:00 +0000

Not sure what exactly is happening for your installation, but I wouldn’t count on anything in the /tmp location remaining across reboots of the system. I had similar problems and that is why I dump stuff to a file in the %post section to ease in diagnosing the problem. Maybe you could try something like this to help troubleshoot further:

%post –nochroot
cp /tmp/varfile /mnt/root/varfile # This way you can examine the contents

%post
. /root/varfile

By: John Champion

John Champion — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:50:00 +0000

Thanks for a great example! I’m stuck at one part though – I’ve set mine up to save a variable to /tmp/varfile in the %pre section (like you did) and then copy it from /tmp to /mnt/sysimage/tmp in the %post –nochroot section. Finally I source it (.) in the %post section (which is actually output to S99postconf). Doesn’t appear the file is actually getting copied to /mnt/sysimage/tmp since (I assume) it should STILL be in /tmp after the build is complete.

Any suggestions?