Scope
This article covers the steps required to install VMware ESXi 5.5 on the Gigabyte Brix, and a few other systems that use non-supported NICs that worked in ESXi 5.1.
Tag: Gigabyte Brix
2013-09-23 00:27: Added information about ESXi 5.5 not including RTL8111E support
2013-09-23 22:23: Added a link to installing ESXi 5.5 with RTL8111E support
In my last post, I covered my journey of finding a small, quiet, low-power virtualisation lab computer that can run nested virtualisation.
The final system
To summarise, here’s the system I ended up with, after much consideration:
- Gigabyte Brix, Core i5 barebones kit (GB-XM11-3337) [Buy in the UK]
- 16GB (2x8GB) SO-DIMM Crucial RAM
- Plextor M5M 256GB SSD [Buy in the UK]
Recently, after about 2 years away, I’ve started to get back into Virtualisation. As part of that, like any true geek, I wanted to build a Home Lab.
I had some criteria for the homelab computer:
- Must be quiet
- Should be power-efficient/low power. Energy in the UK is expensive!
- CPU must support Intel VT-x with EPT, and VT-d virtualisation technologies
- Under £600 (roughly $1,000)
- System must be powerful enough to run nested hypervisors (enough RAM, CPU and Storage capacities)
- Minimal self-build. I don’t have the inclination to build a white-box solution. If you do, check out Chris Wahl’s awesome resources.
And some nice-to-haves:
- Compact physical footprint
- Preferably run VMware ESXi without any installer ISO hacks or driver mods
- It should have enough Storage capacity to host AutoLab and some Hyper-V instances, too.
I’ve been playing with getting the Gigabyte Brix to Wake-On-LAN.
Most Windows-based tools didn’t work out of the box for me; but after some experimentation with the Depicus Wake on LAN cmd tool, I worked out the information required to wake it up generally.
wolcmd <mac of target> <ip of target> <network subnet mask> <port 8900 or port 7>
For my system, the command was:
wolcmd <mac without punctuation> 192.168.1.10 255.255.255.0 8900
Hopefully this is useful for other people to WOL their Gigabyte Brix from any OS 🙂
Note that you must have Erp in the BIOS disabled for this to work. If you enable Erp in the BIOS (which enables super-low power usage) Wake-on-LAN doesn’t function from a powered-off state.