OpenBSD 4.1 on ESX Server 3.0.1
Published on 23 May 2007 · Filed in Explanation · 222 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)Having tested a couple of the previous releases of OpenBSD on various versions of ESX Server (OpenBSD 3.8 here and version 3.9 here), I decided to test OpenBSD 4.1 on ESX Server 3.0.1. I didn’t really expect any problems at first, but then I stumbled across this article describing a problem between OpenBSD 4.1 and ESX Server 2.5. Fortunately, it appears as if that problem does not affect ESX Server 3.0.1.
The VM configuration was pretty straightforward; just change the SCSI controller to LSI Logic instead of BusLogic and everything should work beautifully. The OpenBSD 4.1 release notes indicate a new driver for the VMware VMXnet NIC driver, but I haven’t had the opportunity to test this yet; my installation is still using the pcn0 driver.
After installing OpenBSD, I was able to successfully install a number of packages using pkg_add (pulling the packages down via FTP). Not confident that I had transferred enough data to be sure that I wasn’t going to see the same issue the other blogger ran into with his installation, I fired up Interarchy and transferred a 450MB ISO file via SFTP. The file transfer completed successfully and I ran into no problems.
I’ll likely experiment with adding the VMXnet driver within the next few days to see how that works and how it affects network performance.