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Pre-Build an ESXi image so it can be used for openstack as an VM with glance.

Hint: forked to remove author-related ssh keys, passwords and cleanup the image. Still all the credits to virt-lighting for doing the hard work!

Requirements

A Linux system
Libvirt, virt-install and virt-viewer (and qemu/firewalld depending on your system)
CDRtools (genisoimage)
ESXi ISO image

Arch setup

sudo pacman -Syu ebtables dnsmasq libvirt qemu virt-install virt-viewer cdrtools firewalld

sudo systemctl enable --now firewalld
sudo systemctl restart libvirtd

Build your image

Download the ISO's from the vmware interface and place it locally into the repo.

./build.sh isos/VMware-VMvisor-Installer-6.5.0.update01-5969303.x86_64.iso
./build.sh isos/VMware-VMvisor-Installer-6.7.0-8169922.x86_64.iso
./build.sh isos/VMware-VMvisor-Installer-6.7.0.update03-14320388.x86_64.iso
./build.sh isos/VMware-VMvisor-Installer-7.0U3-18644231.x86_64.iso

Credentials

User: root Password: Verysecret123!!

Obviously change those. You can also use password or admin_pass in the user-data to set the password via cloud-init

KVM configuration

You need to add the two following lines in kvm module configuration:

options kvm_intel nested=1 enable_apicv=n
options kvm ignore_msrs=1

Depending on the Linux distribution, the configuration file is located here:

Fedora: /etc/modprobe.d/kvm.conf
Ubuntu: /etc/modprobe.d/qemu-system-x86.conf

OpenStack

You need to associate a couple of extra parameters to the image:

hw_disk_bus=sata: if you use a old OpenStack version, you may encouter LP1759420. The ESXi starts but cannot see its harddrive. In this case, use ide instead. It will slow the start up a bit, but everything will be functional..
hw_cpu_policy=dedicated: this one is a nice to have to avoid Purple Screen of Death
img_config_drive=mandatory: the esxi-cloud-init.py script within the image only support config drive.
hw_cdrom_bus=ide
hw_vif_model=e1000: there is no virtio driver on ESXi.
hw_qemu_guest_agent=no: and the image does not include any QEMU agent.

You can use the following command to upload you image:

openstack image create --disk-format qcow2 --container-format bare --file esxi-${VERSION}.qcow2 --property hw_disk_bus=sata --property hw_cpu_policy=dedicated --property img_config_drive=mandatory --property hw_cdrom_bus=ide --property hw_vif_model=e1000 --property hw_boot_menu=true --property hw_qemu_guest_agent=no --min-disk 1 --min-ram 4096 esxi-${VERSION}

Be sure to use hw_vif_model=e1000e if it is ESXi 7.x

EugenMayer / esxi-cloud-images

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