ESXi in itself is a nice idea, a cool tool and everything. I really like it. Until stuff goes bad. And it goes bad.
Yesterday I had a great time, migrating an ESXi 3.5 installation from a RAID1 set on a HP DL360 G6 to a RAID5 on a HP DL360 G5. The G6 uses a P410i controller, while the G5 uses a P400, so I wasn't sure that it'll be a plug-n-play migration... But lo and behold, i tried it and it worked (after a block level full backup, of course). Migrating from RAID1 to 5 was just a cool run with dd, no sweat.
So it's done, I fire it up, ESXi boots nicely... and can't find it's own storage... After 30mins of quality Google time, this dude saved my ass:
http://cyborgworkshop.org/2008/09/14/adding-a-lun-with-an-existing-vmfs-into-an-esxi-node/
On a related note, ESXi sucks big time if you install it on the same disk as the storage. And since we don't use iSCSI or FC here, and I never succeeded in installing it on a USB drive, I had to do just that. That usually means that you can't upgrade your 3.5 to 4.0 for starters, and while I obtained 73GB free space from the RAID migration (which actually doubled my disk space), I can't partition and use it... So, guess I'll try the mentioned USB install method (just dd the little SOB to the drive and done). More info on that once it's done.
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