Ok, now let’s get some veeam action going. First up get a virtual machine running inside my esx host.

So, using vcenter I opened up the storage on my first ESX server and went to upload an ISO of server 2008. I got the

Failed to log into nfc server

Did some googling looks like I need to open up an additional port.

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Ok, one annoyance when you go to add ports, you always have to scroll up to the very top to the hit the plus sign…. this gets really tedious when adding multiple ports.

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hmm haven’t quite got that to work. I’ll just try FastSCP direct to the ESX host

Ok, that worked fine. Just turned back on SSH on the ESX1 and connected with veeam fastSCP (Probably is quicker transfer anyhoot)

… OK, no scratch that, I’ll just use the Ravello VM Import Tool. Strange interface bug though, If I have type ISO, VMDK selected it doesn’t show iso’s but when I flip it to QCOW it does??? go figure

So, now I created a VM, and set the cd drive of the vm to the host device so I can boot off the ISO.

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After a medium amount of futzing I was finally able to connect to the console. The trick was you need to add the public address of the esx server. I think this makes sense because I think the console must connect directly to the VM? I don’t really know for sure, I just know it works!

gak.. Trying to boot off of the host CDROM doesn’t appear to work? So I’m going to try and mount the cdrom from within the shell and copy the ISO over. Wish me luck

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Double, triple scratch that. Couldn’t figure out how to copy across from the esxi CDROM over to a volume. Went back to square one, now that I used the public address to the ESXi box to vcenter I was able to finally access the datastore, I am now copying the ISO across… I’m guessing this is going to take a long while.

Hmm well it finished copying, but when I try and boot the box no joy… grrr I’ll try another copy 🙂

Ok, this time around I used veeam file copy. Instead of taking 6 hours it only took 24 mins to transfer the 2.8 GB ISO so that is a great improvement!

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Well looks like I have hit on some sort of bug. This post is pretty close to what I am experiencing when I try to connect to the console of the 2008R2 Box https://support.ravellosystems.com/entries/94984138-Windows-Server-on-ESXi-Host-

(I also tried server2012 to see if it made a difference, but so far no joy)

I can see the BIOS boot, but when it goes to boot the CD-ROM to install the OS it just stays at a blank screen.

I’m going to try installing server 2008R2 in its own container and see if it can perhaps get to the console?

See next post.

https://michaelellerbeck.com/2015/08/18/ravello-veeam-and-the-chaos-monkeys-part-4/