Hacking your ESX 3i Server
Oct/0717
Well all my ESX servers at home are now migrated to ESX 3i and I have to say what a great concept. Just stick in a memory stick and you are up and running. After playing with it for some days now I wanted to share some tricks with you.
First ESX 3i is based on the new ESX platform and therefor now supporting SATA drives 
Yahooooo! I can run ESX now properly and native on my laptops. I have tested this with my IBM X60 (Centrino Dual Core) and Dell Latitude D410 (Pentium M single core) and on both it works fine. It sees my drives and I can format a VMFS partition on it and it supports the build-in NICs in the laptops.
Getting a command line
The cool thing about ESX 3i is of course that it is small and no longer has the Service Console.. but this means also NO command line on the ESX server anymore 
But being a techie, I love command lines! And after some searching I did find out you can still get a command line on the ESX 3i Server. Sure it does not run a full blow Linux, but most of the VMware commands like vmkfstools and esxcfg-* are still available.
So how do you get this command line? Well easy, follow these steps:
shellIf you want this command line permanently available to you, you can set this up in the Virtual Infrastructure client that is connected to your ESX 3i Server..
Now everytime you reboot your 3i server, the shell will be activated. On extra nice option directly below the shell option is the VMkernel.Boot.smallFontForTTY, this will change the shell from 80×25 characters to a 50 line font, which will allow you to much easier work on the shell.
Customizing the ESX 3i Main screen
Checking the advanced options list, I found one other nice option called Annotations. Here you can specify the Annotations.WelcomeMessage. What ever message you type here will be displayed on the ESX 3i main screen (when not logged in), so you can specify who is responsible for this server or something creative like that.
Hacking the ESX 3i Server Root Password
In case you every are called in to manage an ESX 3i server, but nobody know the root password, here an easy way to ‘fix’ this challange.
passwdReset="TRUE" The root password is now reset and you get full access. Always handy trick to know
Well that is for now, if you find more cool tricks let me know and I will add them to the list.
Enjoy playing with your ESX 3i server.
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6:40 am on October 3rd, 2007
Great article.
How did your upgrade go ?
Did you just power on, you old ESX, with your new USB stick, and then it worked, or did you have to migrate from a old machine, to a new one ?
Cant really find anyone, who tryed to upgrade from ESX 3.x to 3I.
10:48 am on October 3rd, 2007
Hi All,
is there any way to get 3i running with VC 2.01?
Cheers
Pekopeter
3:28 pm on October 3rd, 2007
Robert,
I did an “upgrade” from esx 3.0.1 -> 3i. I wouldn’t really call it an upgrade though. I plugged in the USB stick and powered on my server. Once up it detected all my VMFS3 volumes but I still had to browse the datastores to register the VMs. It didn’t really keep any information from my old installation ( which I expected ) so I also had to reconfigure networks etc. I wasn’t sold on the v3i Idea at VMworld but I’ve totally change my tune since I got home a tried it. It’s going to make keeping systems updated painless, and since I manage a large farm of ESX hosts that makes me happy. Unfortunately there are still no hooks for things like SIM agents which I rely on to send hardware failure alerts.
8:31 am on October 4th, 2007
Hi Dominic.
Thanks for your reply.
Ill think that ill give the upgrade a try later
Have you tryed installing the SIM agent, in the busybox OS, thats avaliable now, using the hack, describes in this article ?
It might work
1:37 pm on October 4th, 2007
Thanks for posting this… I spent a lot of time talking to one of the developers of ESX 3i at VMworld and he said a limited command line would be there, but every time I tried to get more information about it the next day everyone at the VMware booth looked at me like I was crazy!
12:02 pm on October 5th, 2007
Good tricks!!!
The password reset trick makes ESX3i so vulnerable! That basicall means that anyone who has physical access to the ESX hosts can now reconfigure all settings. I hope VMWare fix this before RTM.
12:16 pm on October 5th, 2007
For the password reset, this feature is available in almost every hardware based appliance that I know of. You can do a similar trick with Cisco switches and routers. You can do this with Brocarde switches. You can do it with McData switches. You can do it with Checkpoint firewalls. You can do it with F5 load balancers. I could go on and on. You need some way to be able to recover a password otherwise if you forget it you’d just have to throw the thing away (or reinstall in our case).
Remember, that this does require physical access. If you don’t trust your security for physical access then you have bigger issues then being able to do a password reset on a host. People could just go in and take your drives and walk out with your data or do other malicious activities like install a small device to do network captures (it’s happened). Work on physical security first before you start complaining about convenience features.
1:54 pm on October 5th, 2007
On mike with this one… Any Windows, Linux system can be administrator password bypassed, so this is no issue what so ever for an 3i server.
5:27 pm on October 9th, 2007
erm, is 3i available by download? Where may i get it from, as ESX3.5 is currently announced only?
10:49 am on October 15th, 2007
Hi Domnic ,
instead of re-registering all the VM’s again , you can take the backup of your ESX3.X VM’s inventory i.e “/etc/vmware/hostd/vmInventory.xml” and after booting into ESX3i just replace this file in the same place and then restart the mgmt service.Your all VM’s will be back .
4:06 pm on October 16th, 2007
liked the article; is the 32mb program available for download and if so where ?
7:18 am on November 26th, 2007
3i is really cool! I’m still waiting to get 3i here.
10:54 pm on November 29th, 2007
Sorry to say but the option for the shell seems to be gone in build 39330 release, and the setting VMkernel.Boot.Shell also, but checking out the new vmkernal.boot.logOnScreen check box option…. and VMKernal.boot.vmkKeyboard ….
4:46 pm on February 8th, 2008
for 3.5i this is not working anymore, nether shift-O, nether vmkernal.boot.logOnScreen.
2:29 pm on April 17th, 2008
“First ESX 3i is based on the new ESX platform and therefor now supporting SATA drives ”
Tried to install ESX 3i (3.5.0-82664) on my IBM Thinkpad x61s.
The SATA disks are not there
I’m trying to figure out if there is a big difference between the IBM Thinkpad x60 and IBM Thinkpad x61s or did you make another trick to enable the SATA support?
Yahooooo my ass!
4:12 pm on July 10th, 2008
I try to use passwdReset=”TRUE” in a ESX 3i that I don’t have the password but it don’t go well. When I try to config the system it continuous asking for the root password.