Building a Diskless and Stateless

ESXi Server

Objectives

To setup a ESXi server which is diskless and

stateless.
Diskless:
The ESXi server will boot from a read-only disk/image.
Theres no write to the boot disk after booted up.

Stateless:
ESXi doesnt actively persist its state across reboots.
Store all the configurations somewhere else.

POC environment:

HP BL460 blade server

ESXi 4.1
Virtual Center 4.1
Windows 2008 DHCP server

Install/Configuration process
overview
Remove two hard drive disks from the bl460
server.
Install one 4GB SD card.
Boot and install ESXi to SD card.
ESXi server boot and gets its management IP from
DHCP server.
Add ESXi to Virtual Center.
Apply host profile to the ESXi server.
Use vSphere CLI to put ESXi scratch space on
datastore
Make the boot SD card read-only

Hardware Install

SD Card Here

Blade server running

without hard drive
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Install ESXi

ESXi install detects the SD

card automatically and will
install OS there

Post-install console setup

Need to set initial root

password

IP address

Obtain management IP
address from DHCP server

Host profile
Right click the new host->Host Profile ->Manage Profile and select the
right one.
Right click the new host->Host Profile ->Manage Profile
VC will show all the changes before applying them to the new host.

Change Scratch space

Command: vicfg-advcfg.pl s <datastore location>

ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation

Boot from read-only disk

Change the SD card to read-only
ESXi server booted up and ran without any issue
Since the boot disk is read only, it should be feasible to boot from a image
file.

Set the SD card to readonly

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Benefits and Next steps

Less Cost
No moving parts on the server, less likely to fail.
Faster deployment and recovery.
Can be deployed in small site where SAN is not available.
This solution uses standard tool and hardware which is fully
supported.
Next steps:

Create a image file from SD card and try to boot from there
Script all steps
PXE Boot??
Implement some of the solutions in data centers.

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