Serial Console on VMWare ESX

I primarily use HP ILO's on our DL360s. I never get ILO Advanced Pack..Its expensive, and I ues UNIX so, for my BSD and Linux machines I just use serial consoles... It beats buying the license...and I don't need the graphical stuff... Thats what X servers are for.

Compiled this from a defunct wiki from some edu, but its pretty much common sense. Just wanted to document it for those who care ;)

For an ESX Server:
This is about enabling the console of ESX server to be a serial port. Running an IP KVM for ESX servers seems a really expensive thing to do, when it just needs a shell.

This is a method I use for RHEL/CentOS. I had to modify it slightly for VMware ESX:
Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf
Add the following lines after "timeout=3" line

serial --unit=0 --speed=9600 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal --timeout=8 serial console

* The first line tells GRUB to use the first serial port at a baud rate of 9600
* The second line gives the user 8 seconds to decide where GRUB should output it's information. * Please adjust port number and speed as per your setup.

Append the kernel entry in /boot/grub/grub.conf to add serial console:


kernel /vmlinuz ro root=UUID=675026ae-e3ee-4340-8614-9173f59d5bfb mem=300M quiet console=ttyS0,9600

Edit /etc/inittab to add a new line for agetty. I placed this after the mingetty entries:

s0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L -f /etc/issueserial 9600 ttyS0 vt100

Additional notes: - root logins are restricted over ttysX by default unless your ttysX is added to the securetty config. So, edit /etc/securettty and add your port to your config if you want to allow root logins.

For a VM:
To add a serial console to VMWare ESX, there's no way to do it either from the web console nor from their dinky vmware-console. There's just grayed out menu items that torment your soul leaving you with a bitter taste of unfulfilled possibilites. Yet there is hope!

Here I add serial console 0. serial0.present = "TRUE" serial0.fileType = "file" serial0.fileName = "/tmp/console.debian26_dan"

then add in your kernel boot options (ie, in /boot/grub/menu.lst) console=ttyS0,19200
like this: kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdc1 ro console=ttyS0,19200 console=tty0

now as you do crazy things to the kernel and crash it (ie, run zap), you can access your kernel log for debugging information in /tmp/console.debian26_dan.

NOTE: this enables a serial console for a guest machine on ESX. It does not enable a serial console for the ESX system itself, for that see above. ;p