VMware ESXi 3.5

FreeBSD

Performance regressions in FreeBSD 7.1

There is a regression for performance under VMware ESXi 3.5.0? and FreeBSD 7.1 with regards to disk. I have found that the following fixes the problem and brings disk performance back up to levels from FreeBSD 7.0:

/boot/loader.conf

kern.hz=100

/etc/sysctl.conf

vfs.read_max=256

/etc/rc.local

camcontrol tags da0 -N 127
camcontrol negotiate 0:0 -a -W 16 -O 127 -R 160.000

Open source VMware tools

For VMware guest tools on FreeBSD, you should use the new open source "open-vm-tools":

To install the port

Make sure that you have /usr/src to be able to build the kernel modules.

cd /usr/ports/emulators/open-vm-tools-nox11
make install

/etc/rc.conf

vmware_guest_vmmemctl_enable="YES"
vmware_guestd_enable="YES"

Integrating 3ware 9650SE drivers

The following instructions will allow you to install ESXi as the system device on a 3ware 9650SE controller. I will show you how to use a USB key as the installation medium for ESXi. I will explain how to edit both the root oem.tgz on the installation disc as well as the disk image used for hard drive installation, the drivers that we will use will be the oem.tgz provided by 3ware on their support site. This guide assumes that you have ESXi 3.5.0 Update 4 and decent knowledge of Linux.

Preparation

Download VMware ESXi Update 4 ISO (named VMware-VMvisor-InstallerCD-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.iso for Update 4) from the VMware website to your /tmp directory,
A blank USB key of at least 512Mb for VMware ESXi installation,
A Linux (Ubuntu used in this example) workstation available for creation of the VMware ESXi installation.

Step by Step instructions

To prepare your workstation for making an ESXi USB medium, you can execute the following commands (We will assume you are using 'root' for all commands):

To install the syslinux package on Ubuntu to make your USB key bootable, and make temporary directories used to house the ESXI images:

mkdir -p /mnt/usb /mnt/esxi /mnt/esxi-dd /tmp/esxi /tmp/esxi-install
apt-get install syslinux

Now we need to format & mount the USB key and mount the ESXi installation disc downloaded via ISO, Warning: Your USB key may not be /dev/sdb, please verify what device your USB is before proceeding.

mkfs -t msdos /dev/sdb1
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
mount -o loop /tmp/VMware-VMvisor-InstallerCD-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.iso /mnt/esxi

Copy the ESXi installation disc that was mounted on /mnt/esxi and unmount it after copying, prepare for syslinux usage:

cp -Rp /mnt/esxi/* /tmp/esxi
cp -p /tmp/esxi/isolinux.cfg /tmp/esxi/syslinux.cfg
umount /mnt/esxi

Download the oem.tgz provided by 3Ware support & intergrate it into the first stage of the installation disc:

wget -O /tmp/oem.tgz "http://www.3ware.com/kb/attachments/oem-GUID37c5a5bac94746b990d406364588bb63.tgz"
cp -p /tmp/oem.tgz /tmp/esxi/oem.tgz

Now we are going to update/extract the installation image (install.tgz) which is extracted to the hard drive on the ESXi host:

cd /tmp/esxi-install
tar -zxvpf /tmp/esxi/install.tgz
cd /tmp/esxi-install/usr/lib/vmware/installer
bunzip2 VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd.bz2

We need to find out the sector size of the dd image so that we can mount the appropriate command, it can be accomplished by doing:

fdisk -ul VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd

You should receive a command output like this:

root@ubuntu:/tmp/esxi-install/usr/lib/vmware/installer# fdisk -ul VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.

Disk VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd: 0 MB, 0 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

                                           Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd1            8192     1535999      763904    5  Extended
VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd4   *          32        8191        4080    4  FAT16 <32M
VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd5            8224      106495       49136    6  FAT16
VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd6          106528      204799       49136    6  FAT16
VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd7          204832      430079      112624   fc  VMware VMKCORE
VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd8          430112     1535999      552944    6  FAT16

Partition table entries are not in disk order

You most likely will want to mount the one that is bolded, labeled dd5, so we can issue the following to mount the DD image and copy the update oem.tgz provided by 3ware support to it:

mount -o loop,offset=$((512*8224)) VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd /mnt/esxi-dd
cp -p /tmp/oem.tgz /mnt/esxi-dd
umount /mnt/esxi-dd

Now we must re-bzip2 the image for reintergration into install.tgz, we must also recompress install.tgz:

bzip2 VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd
cd /tmp/esxi-install
rm /tmp/esxi/install.tgz
tar -czvf /tmp/esxi/install.tgz sbin/ usr/

We are done the major parts of the update to the disc now, lets copy it to the USB key and initialize syslinux:

cp -Rp /tmp/esxi/* /mnt/usb
syslinux -s /dev/sdb1
umount /dev/sdb1
cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdb

Everything should be done, now you can boot from the ESXi key and install your ESXi host on barebones 3ware 9650SE — Make sure your USB key is bootable!