Installing Fedora 21 and ESXi 5.5 on my new Shuttle DS81

As I previously wrote, I recently assembled a new workstation for the home lab that I will be using as both a Linux and ESXi host. I’ll be using it as an admin workstation while not traveling (Linux) and then leave it running as a hypervisor in my lab while I’m on the road (ESXi).

Installing ESXi:
Since I had a few other ESXi hosts on the network, this install was very easy. I put one of my other hosts into maintenance mode and shut it down. I then took the USB stick that has the ESXi install on it and cloned it. My existing ESXi usb disk was /dev/sdd below and the new ESXi install disk was /dev/sdc. This only works if you are using the same size disk (or if the newer disk is a larger size). Here are the steps I used (as always, PLEASE be careful with dd. It can erase your hard drive if you are not careful!).

sudo dd if=/dev/sdd of=/home/chris/esxi.img bs=1M
sudo dd if=/home/chris/esxi.img of=/dev/sdc bs=1M

Once that was done, I just put the newly imaged USB disk into the new computer and booted to the USB drive. It came up without issue so on the ESXi console I logged in and selected “Reset System Configuration (Factory Reset).” The system rebooted and I configured it like any other ESXi host in my environment. Here is what it looks like in the vSphere client:

Installing Fedora:
This was fairly straightforward, I just wrote the Fedora live ISO to a USB stick on my mac and booted the system from the USB stick. The OS was installed to the 128 GB mSATA disk I installed and everything went smooth. Fedora’s install instructions are here if you need them. After the OS was installed, I ran the following commands to get flash, chrome, silverlight and java set up and running. I also installed cinnamon and xfce since I really don’t like Gnome 3:

sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-21.noarch.rpm
sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-21.noarch.rpm
sudo yum update -y
sudo yum -y install vlc yum-plugin-fastestmirror icedtea-web wget
sudo rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
sudo yum -y install flash-plugin
sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
sudo yum -y install @cinnamon-desktop @xfce-desktop
wget https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//packages/pipelight-selinux/0.2.1/2.fc21/noarch/pipelight-selinux-0.2.1-2.fc21.noarch.rpm
sudo dnf install ./pipelight-selinux-0.2.1-2.fc21.noarch.rpm
sudo pipelight-plugin --update
pipelight-plugin --help
pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight5.1
pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight5.0
pipelight-plugin --enable flash

Finally, I installed docker and disabled the local firewall:

sudo yum install docker -y
sudo systemctl start docker
sudo systemctl enable docker
sudo systemctl disable firewalld
sudo systemctl stop firewalld


The final thing I needed to do was install the vCO client which is easily done by downloading the installer from the vCO appliance web page. When I was done, I had a desktop that looks like this: