Friday, May 29, 2015

Running Arista vEOS on ESXi6

Having scampered around for a while in search of an L2 switch to interconnect all my VMs (especially the ones for CCIE JNCIE CNSE and CCSA exams) inside my Dell R710 server, I stumbled yet again on Arista's vEOS which in my honest opinion, is a very good OS and very similar to cisco's IOS. It supports basic L2 functionality and advanced L3 functionality. The purpose of this post is not to discuss it's features but rather to discuss what needs to be done to get this up and running in VMWare ESXi6. For those that have run this vEOS on earlier versions of ESXi - 5.5 and lower - there has been no issues as the installation and bootup process are seamless.
In ESXi6 however, there's a little twist and tweak to be done to get it to work. The tweak is to convert the vEOS VMDK file from thin to think because by default, ESXi6 treats the VMDK as sparse whereas ESXi5.5 treats it as Thick. Refer to https://eos.arista.com/tip-for-arista-veos-on-vmware-esx-6/#comment-494
Note:
1)Log in to ESXi shell and navigate to the VM folder in the datastore that houses the vmdk image

2) Do "ls" command to verify that the image resides in that folder.

3) Issue the command below to convert the vmdk to thick provision
vmkfstools -i vEOS-lab-4.15.0F.vmdk -d eagerzeroedthick vEOS-lab-4.15.0F-thick.vmdk
 
 
4)Modify VM settings, delete the old hard disk, add new hard disk and reference the 
new thick provisioned vmdk.
 
  
5)Save the VM settings and power on the VM.

HTH