Mounting an ISO to an installed VM on VMWare ESXi

I had a little maintenance item to do which involved mounting an ISO to a working VM. Even when the ISO was attached from the VM settings, it somehow was not booting from the device, apparently ESXi sets the first boot device to the HDD by default once a OS is loaded and it will never boot from the CD/ISO. In this case I was using Linux gparted, but for the Windows guys it can be a Windows Server Rescue or something.

This is how I got it to work:

1. Set boot delay to 3000 milliseconds.

                 -Right Click VM -> Edit settings
                 - Options Tab, edit Boot options -> Power on Boot Delay parameter (I used 3000ms or 3 seconds)

2. Mount the ISO from the Datastore / Client DVD

                 - Right Click VM -> Edit settings
                 - Options Tab, CD/DVD Drive x, browse to uploaded ISO or Client Device.

3. Start the VM, at the boot menu hit ESC

4. Select CD/DVD boot option

5. Use your ISO media / Application.

6. When completed reset the Boot Delay parameter to 0.

-noveck

Installing gparted on CentOS 5.x

Okay, so a situation arose where I need to use gparted to do a quick resize on a production server, and this package is not part of the base repository.

It is in the EPEL repo, so that will need to be installed first (if not already done).

Anyhow, it's really simple, so read on...

Assumptions: Base installation of CentOS 5.x

0. Login as root or su

1. Install additional repos

Navigate to temporary directory

cd /temp
download EPEL repo

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Note: The above URL is sporadic. Please use this alternative if the original does not work. - http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Install the repo
rpm -Uvh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

2. Install the gparted package and dependencies.

yum install gparted --enablerepo=epel disablerepo=rpmforge

*note the rpmforge repo must be disabled before installing (where applicable)

3. Run the application from terminal
gparted

More information can be found here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/


-noveck