When I came into work today I noticed that I wasn’t able to power up a newly created VM in our ESX 3.5 cluster. Within a couple minutes of searching I came across this blog post from Leo.

Eureka! I found it. So now I can automate the vmware-config.pl part of the installation. It turns out that VMware Server keeps a database of sorts in /etc/vmware/locations. This is created during the vmware-install.pl run. If you append “answer EULA_AGREED yes” (without the quotes) to the locations file, it will not present you with the EULA. Here is the complete code. Again, please comment.

I’ve been looking around the net to find a way to automate a VMware Server install on Linux. In the documentation there is a way to automate the install for Windows, but not Linux. In our environment, we run a minimal Ubuntu 7.10 install for our hosts. Below is my hackish attempt to automate it. This works for our environment but I make no claims it will work for yours. The first script (shown below) installs the packages and sets a couple variables that are important to us.