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.
Tags: BSD, ESX, UNIX, Virtualization, VMware
-
how did you create the config file for OpenBSD on ESX 3.01?
-
I have been using OpenBSD 4.1 on ESX 3.0.1 (at a july2007 patch-level) for about 5 months or so, using the LSI controller and the pcn driver. These systems are deployed as carp/pf/pfsync firewalls and I have enjoyed excellent performance. I’m interested in trying the vic driver, but I unless I see performance problems, I’m hesitant to change a very reliable configuration.
Btw, I have been a casual FreeBSD user for several years, I have been always impressed with how easy and straightforward everything is with Free and OpenBSD. I will probably never buy a Cisco Firewall product ever again. PF is a dream!



6 comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2007/05/23/openbsd-41-on-esx-server-301/trackback/