Important update at the end of the article! It voids part of the article, will go back to deploying VCVA and then continue.
Recently I installed ESXi on my Thinkpads (1 and 2) using a USB thumb drive. The installation was very straight forward and great for a lab environment. However a host without a data store is no good and the internal drive is not to be messed with. The NAS in the living room is slow and only accessible via wifi (unless I want to carry the laptop around). Initially I just plugged in an old USB hdd to see if I could use it. Out of the box that doesn't work, most likely because the ESX does not support USB storage for data stores (USB can be passed through to VMs though, so it might be to prevent conflicts).A virtual NAS might be a good way to make it all very portable and flexible I though. So I just grabbed the T61, installed Workstation 9 (and completed a Cloud Cred Task while I did so) and setup a Debian VM that would be my iSCSI target. The host has 3GB Ram, so I figured 2GB for the VM would be fair. That way its got a little bit of caching leverage. Pop in a cross over cable to connect both laptops and everyting should be fine... or so I thought.
I configured a local network among the two hosts, bridged the VM into it, fired up vCenter client to connect to the ESX and attached the iSCSI target... Here's me showing off my mad MSPaint drawing skills. Anyways you get the point.
Next I deployed VCVA onto the data store, which went surprisingly well...Boots up nicely still, but fails to configure the network via DHCP, as there is no DHCP server around. Confident I would be able to configure an IP manually I logged into the console and followed the instructions (/opt/vmware/shared/vami/vami_config_net) and configured a static IP address, only to find that I could not connect to the web config. I rebooted the VM countless times, checked resources inside the VM, everything looks good, but the web gui does not seem to come up. This is silly I thought, fired off a "aptitude install isc-dhcp-server" in the iSCSI VM and redeployed the VCVA. Yet again it did not get an IP address during boot. The DHCP logs say its been asigned, but the VM shows 0.0.0.0. I'm sensing resource contentions, but that's kind of the theme of the blog, isn't it? Logged into the VM again, reran dhclient, get an IP, login to web gui and configure the appliance straight forward (Eula, default SSO config). All is well in VCVA land, it takes a while but eventually all services start up fine. Next I configure a host name and static IP address, which becomes active instantly (at least ping works) but thats pretty much it. I get the certificate warning in the browser (and vCenter client) but cannot connect any further. As if the lighttp-proxy works, but the Tomcat handling the actual request, doesn't play along. Checking various VMware related services in /etc/init.d show all status running, however I notice once again that the hostname change is not reflected in the VM. I've seen that before, you change the hostname in the webconfig, reboot the appliance and are stuck with localhost.localdom again. That's a bit disappointing. I then configured hostname and corresponding /etc/hosts file manually on the console as I could still not access the webconfig and rebooted the VM. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to do the trick as now I was greeted with "Checking vami-sfcbd status........failed, restarting vami-sfcbd". That's where I'm getting really annoyed. As much as I like the idea of the appliance, a lot of times its more pain than gain. So as I type this I am installing a W2K8 server that will host my vCenter...
Summary
Another more or less road trip approach (as in "It's not the outcome that counts, but how you get there") that shows that with a little creativity you can actually set up a simple and very cheap lab at home, that will be more powerful (and especially more of a training experience) than installing ESXi in a VM. If you're (currently) limited by your hardware e.g. you do not own a home lab and neither of your accessible workstations/laptops etc. runs on at least a Intel Core i3, you're more or less stuck with this solution if you intend to run 64bit VMs inside your lab ESXi. And it also shows that operating the VCVA outside its recommended specs and/or in an unsupported environment is not always a good idea.
Update
Forget all the ranting about VCVA, it was my own fault. I had the T61 configured to the same IP as the VCVA ;).
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