As we plan to update all of our customers vSphere infrastructures to vSphere 5, I did a little diggin into which install media we should be using.
Most of the servers are from HP, so to do the update, we will do a fresh install from scratch, as the hosts have been updated from ESX 3.5 to 4.0 and 4.1 already, so we want to get a fresh start.
Even some space saving will be done this way, as most of the hosts are still ESX and not migrated to ESXi, yet.
I installed 1 host with the standard VMware ESXi 5.0 ISO, one with the HP customized ESXi 5.0 and a third one with the standard VMware ESXi 5.0 ISO plus the HP offline bundle.
Listed below are the differences in the installed packages.
Differences between VMware ISO, HP ISO and VMware ISO plus HP offline bundle
We thought the HP offline bundle would transform a plain ESXi 5.0 installtion into a HP customized one, but some components are still missing. Most useful would be the hponcfg, as it allows you to configure iLO settings. Another package we could make use of is hpbootcfg, as it would allow us to do PXE installations in the future, without having to do too much work during the boot process, using the iLO remote console.
As the HP customized ESXi 5.0 ISO even saves us 1 reboot during the installation and we don’t have to manually install (yes we could script it, but why should we if HP deliveres) additional tools, we will stick with the HP ISO.