Installing ESXi and XenServer on a Sun X6240

So here goes my first real (second technically) blog!

We recently took delivery of three Sun X6240 blades modules to slot into the rather loud Sun 6000 chassis. The plan for these AMD based blades is to be the corner stone of a new project that will enlarge our virtual infrastructure (scoped by my colleague Julian), with two hosting VMware ESXi 4.0 and one hosting Citrix XenServer 5.5.

All three blades were out of the box, had a 16GB RAM upgrade, fibre and network modules all installed within half an hour. Gotta love that, especially as the only screwdriver required was to pierce the tape holding the boxes together!




The original plan was to install two SAS disks in each server to install the local files required for ESXi and Xen. On booting the blades and accessing the system through the 6000 web GUI it became apparent that there was an issue with the local disks not appearing in the bios or being seen by either installation procedure.

After a bit of fiddling about, reading of online guides, viewing every menu in the BIOS, switching cables internally on the mobo and poking around in the SPP the disks were still not recognised by the installation. Eventually we found this page stating that the server required a REM card to use SAS disks....would have been nice if either our reseller had mentioned is this or if it was mentioned prominently next to the disks Sun website. Just for the record SATA are fine and need no additional hardware.

So, we had a dilemma;

• Go back to the reseller, ask for a quote for the 3 REM modules required (subsequently found out they are about £250 list) and then to the boss cap in hand asking for some more pennies

OR

• Try and install the ESXi 4.0 and Xen Server 5.5 on a USB key and place inside the server on an internal mobo USB socket.

Obviously the later option is more preferable from a technological point of view and we can state we have "saved money" to the management....

After digging around the office for a bit we found some USB key rings, two 32GB keys and one 1GB.

First up was Xen Server. Ran the install, all seemed fine. Rebooted the server, the splash screen popped up and then disappeared and the server rebooted. A little disappointed but some more Googling lead us to Virtualisation Review which describes how modify the boot partition on the installation...worked like a dream and Xen Server is now up and running.

Now on to ESX, similar installation onto the USB stick. Rebooted the server and received the following error message:

Panic: Cannot Get Disk Parameters.



Initial investigation lead to this page on Yellow Bricks, where plenty of people seem to have seen this error.

A fix was to take part of the VMware installation tgz file and write directly to the USB device using dd. Retrieving the stick from the blade and putting it into my handy CentOS installation we ran the appropriate commands, all appeared to install correctly so back into the blade it went. Booted and received the same error.

We then had a look at the BIOS (again!) as we thought there must be something simple that we were missing. Two options initially jumped out:

Under the Advanced IDE Configuration menu "SATA Controller 0" was set to Enabled



Under the "USB Mass Storage Device Configuration" menu the "Emulation Type" was set to Auto (other options are Floppy, Forced FDD, Hard Disk and CDROM)



Putting all our eggs in one basket both were changed, the first to "Disabled" for both disks and the second to "Hard Disk" (naturally).

Rebooted the server and as if by magic the ESXi's majestic yellow splash screen appeared.

Further investigation has shown that only the second change of USB emulation was needed to make the stick boot correctly. Perhaps the Xen installation wouldn't have required the extra modification if this option has been changed in the BIOS too....I suspect I will get around to finding out one day, and I'll be sure to put the findings up as another blog entry.

JW