ESXI Support

[DwayneGit]

Just noting some changes I made and asking some questions.

1. I change the import_rsync_whitelist to allow file for verifying esxi:

#-----------------------------------------------
## VMWare
##-----------------------------------------------
+ b.b00
+ vmware-esx-base-osl.txt
+ boot.cfg
+ mboot.c32
+ imgpayld.tgz
+ efi/
+ efi/boot/
+ efi/boot/*

these are for 6.7 looks like more needs to be added for other versions

2. i get "UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines, with CRLF line terminators"
   followed by "'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 6623: ordinal not in range(128)"

this is coming from import_signatures.py while trying to open "vmware-esx-base-osl.txt"

        elif ftype.find("text") != -1:
            f = open(filename, 'r')
            lines = f.readlines()
            f.close()

I don't get this error while running python in the terminal so i don't know why cobbler is giving this error. for now i told open to ignore errors.

does anyone else have this problem?

[SchoolGuy]

This looks very much like a file we are trying to read is not properly handled. I would group this into the section of handling errors more transparently, as well as logging them better.

Also is ESXI available for everyone, so I could try to run Cobbler on it for testing purposes?

[DwayneGit]

Sorry for the late response was focusing on booting issue. I have notice a few things that need to be changed or document in regards to esxi and booting from gpxe/ipxe. Should i post them here?

I don't know if esxi is available for everyone, i think it may.

[SchoolGuy]

@DwayneGit Yeah no problem. I am also deep down the road currently. Just post your ideas and suggestions here and I will see what I can document where.

Also I looked it up and I can get it esxi for free with some limitations from vmware. Possibly I think I need to set it up to test if you didn't skip anything which you thought was self explanatory (I do that at least sometimes...).

[DwayneGit]

@SchoolGuy these are some of my notes while working out issues with esxi and using remote image store "available-as".

ESXI Issues

• the template files in /etc/cobbler/boot_loader_conf are miss configured.
  - cobbler is looking for /etc/cobbler/boot_loader_conf/bootcfg_system_esxi67.template (old) but the new is bootcfg_esxi67.template. this is also addressed below
  • generating the boot cfg template is looking for esx_module but can’t find it. this is also addressed below

	error: [{‘code': 'VFFSL(SL,"esx_modules",True)',
  		'exc_val': NotFound("cannot find 'esx_modules'",),
  		'lineCol': (12, 9),
  		'rawCode': '$esx_modules',
  		'time': 'Tue May  5 05:58:59 2020'}]

• in tftpgen.py in cobbler source code line 973 uses string library for join but join doesn’t exist
  distro_mirror_name = string.join(distro.kernel.split('/')[-2:-1], ‘’)
  —— change to ——
  distro_mirror_name = ''.join(distro.kernel.split(‘/‘)[-2:-1])

• ipxe needs to be compiled with comboot for esxi

• The following code snippet is added to generate_bootcfg in tftpgen.py so the bootcfg templates can get the modules esx_modules. It is copied from above were it is used “I think” to build cobbler-boot.cfg

            if re.search("esxi[567]", blended['os_version']) is not None:
                realbootcfg = open(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(blended['kernel']), 'boot.cfg')).read()
                bootmodules = re.findall(r'modules=(.*)', realbootcfg)
                for modules in bootmodules:
                    blended['esx_modules'] = modules.replace('/', '')

• in tftgen.py: the boot loader config path is looking for a system or profile in the image name "bootcfg_system|profile_esx6" i remove this requirement. the provided templates don't account for this either.

template = os.path.join(self.settings.boot_loader_conf_template_dir, "bootcfg_%s_%s.template" % (what.xxxx ,distro.os_version))

template = os.path.join(self.settings.boot_loader_conf_template_dir, "bootcfg_%s.template" % (distro.os_version))

— Helpful links

• https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.0/com.vmware.vsphere.install.doc/GUID-F0D4696-3681-4C13-9552-5280C6406376.html
• https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.esxi.install.doc/GUID-147D7509-EFB1-4391-973F-48B015B85C83.html

[SchoolGuy]

@DwayneGit This is indeed very helpful. I think at some point we need to rework the code to remove the need of hacking the code to enable esxi users to use this. It will take me a while until I will be able to work through all of this. I will leave that open until I fixed this properly and documented everything.

[thiller2018]

see also #2277 issue for efi boot.

[SchoolGuy]

Helpful comment with points to takle: #2541 (comment)

[SchoolGuy]

Another helpful comment: #3078 (comment)

[SchoolGuy]

Fixed via #3201

[esasrir]

i am getting could not find kernel image : /images/ESXi8.0-x86_64

can someone please help on this error?