Installing Longhorn x64 on VMWare ESX Server 3.0.x

Apr 24, 2007 · 3 min read  ·
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I recently attended a Longhorn Roadshow in Santa Clara and learned quite a bit about Microsoft's emphasis on virtualization in Longhorn. A lot of companies are going towards virutalizing servers, even those still running NT or Exchange 5.5. The main reasons seem to be saving rackspace and saving electricity (fewer machines, less A/C) which both translate to saving money. Fortunately, my employer now has the infrastructure setup and virtualization on a mass scale seems like a possiblity. After a quick evaluation, I don't have much faith in Microsoft's current Virtual Server product but an evaluation of ESX Server 3.0 has proven impressive. VMWare has it together and it is likely the solution I'll be recommending in '08 when we're ready to move forward.

That said, it's been tough installing Longhorn x64 on VMWare ESX server. It should be expected, though; the support for Longhorn x64 isn't even experimental yet -- it's non-existent. I had to select Vista 64-bit Experimental as my base VM and hope for the best. What I've experienced is almost as painful as installing Windows 2003 R2 on a Macbook :|  Most of the frustration revolves around the CD-ROM drivers. The initial install of Longhorn on ESX is so promising but then a message pops up that says: "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing." At first, I thought this was because I was using an external USB DVD-R drive but that turned out not to be the case. I figured that gem out only after going through all these steps:

  • I installed some dumb .flp that never loaded the CD-ROM drivers as promised
  • I asked a friend to bring me an internal CDROM only to find out it's EIDE and my server doesn't support it
  • I took my work workstation's IDE CD-ROM and hooked it half-up to my server (the IDE cable) and half-up to a workstation (the power cable because my server didn't have any free power cables left).
  • Enabled IDE in the BIOS and finally had ESX recognize the drive
  • Still had the same problem

So then I got creative and decided to create the Longhorn image on another workstation. Doh! The workstation's CPU was not 64-bit enabled. So then I tried it on my laptop.. doh! It's 64-bit enabled but doesn't have some special VT chip that's often times not found in laptops. This is why I hate hardware.

So I gave in and ..

  • Wiped ESX and reinstalled Longhorn 64-bit.
  • Installed the free VMware server, created a Longhorn Virtual Machine and installed Longhorn
  • Once the install was complete, I backed up the vmdk to another machine
  • I then wiped Longhorn on the server, resinstalled ESX and copied the vmdk to /vmfs/volumes/storage1/longhorn
  • Next, I ran vmkfstools -i longhorn-64ws.vmdk longhorn-64esx.vmdk
  • Once that was done, I created a new Virtual Machine within ESX and selected Custom then used the new image longhorn-64esx.vmdk

Ahhh, that worked! But now VMWare tools was giving me trouble. The CD-ROM still didn't work (the CD-ROM, listed as NECVMWar VMWare IDE CDR00 ATA Device, gives the status of "The Device Cannot Start" (Code 10)) so I had to figure out another way around the problem. I copied the windows.iso from /vmimages/tools-isoimages to my workstation using Veeam FastSCP, mounted the ISO, saved the files as a zip under my web root then used IE on the Longhorn server to fetch the zip. Installed and voila, it works!