ô¿ô - Blog by Frank Rusch

Here’s my process for creating Ubuntu VMs on and ESXi 4.0 host.

I downloaded a pre-built VMware 9.10 image from thoughtpolice. I chose the amd64 version and downloaded it via bittorrent.

This image won’t run out of the box on ESXi 4.0 – it must first be converted. For this, I needed to download the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone.

Convert the .vmx file and deploy it to the ESXi host using VMware vCenter Converter Standalone:

• Choose “Convert Machine” button.
• Select source type: “VMware workstation or other VMware virtual machine”.
• Browse to the .vmx file.
• For the destination, choose “VMware Infrastructure virtual machine” and enter appropriate login credentials.
• Type the VM name.

That copies the VMX to the ESXi instance. On my setup, it took about 15 minutes over my LAN.

Once that was all settled, I performed the following standard updates in the VMware console:

# start VM in vSphere – go to console
passwd
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade
sudo nano /etc/hostname # change hostname as needed
sudo /sbin/shutdown -h -P now
# set up router so VM’s MAC address is linked to a single IP
# start VM again in vSphere – go to console
sudo aptitude install openssh-server

Also, update:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Furthermore, I created a user as follows:

# create user
sudo useradd -d /home/myusername -m myusername
sudo passwd myusername
# show user's shell
getent passwd myusername
# change user's shell
sudo chsh -s /bin/bash myusername

To ease file transfers, I installed samba and set up a samba share.