Comments (2)

By admin, July 28, 2011 5:38 pm

Recently, I involved in a project to deploy latest ESXi 4.1 at client site and all of their ESX hosts are Dell Poweredge based.

We know there are two variation of ESXi images, one is the VMware version you normally download from VMware’s web site, the other is the one customized by server vendor such as IBM, HP and Dell. The main difference is those customized ones are modified with vendor specific IPMI/Hardware monitoring stuff, for Dell, they have added some drivers in order for OpenManage SNMP agent to recognize and use. So it’s common sense to use vendor specific ISO if you happen to use their servers.

However, I looked into Dell’s FTP, there are two Completely Different versions founds:

VMware-RecoveryCD-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized.iso
VMware-RecoveryCD-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized_A01.iso
VMware-RecoveryCD-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized_A02.iso
VMware-RecoveryCD-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized_A03.iso
VMware-RecoveryCD-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized_A04.iso

VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized.iso
VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized_A01.iso
VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized_A02.iso
VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized_A03.iso
VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized_A04.iso

And the answer is VMware-VMvisor-Installer is to be installed on local storage (like harddisk or SAN) and VMware-RecoveryCD is for internal embedded devices like SD Card of USB.

In additional, Dell has created more confusion as there are even different versions within each distribute, like for VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized, there is A01, A02, A03 and A04 version.

Lucikly, by carefully reviewing the content of each download, you will soon discover the short cut that is always use the latest number, like A04 in this case because it contains all the previous fixes in A03, A02 and A01.

Hope this helps those who had scratched their hair recently.