No More HP ESXi “Embedded”

I don’t know what is going on at HP these days, I really don’t. Either the VMware / HP relationship is souring a bit, or HP have appointed an imbecile in charge of their side of the deal.

For reasons unknown to man, HP never followed the path of Dell and IBM by integrating their CIM providers with VMware’s ESXi media – it was always a separate download. But at least that separate download was obtainable from VMware. With vSphere 4.0, they have gone one step further and removed the ability to download the HPified ESXi from VMware’s site – you now have to go to http://hp.com/go/esxidownload to get the bits. And what do you get for your trouble? Well to be honest – not a helluva lot. That annoying ProcHot System Board 3 warning is _still_ there on AMD hardware (I thought that was fixed in ESXi 3.5 U4???), but at least you get some storage information now. Local storage information. When ESXi boots it runs from RAM – you could rip the disks out that it was installed onto and nothing would happen. So it’s not really useful there. As for anyone running datastores on local disks, I guess it may be useful. But I’m sure those people are in the minority.

And now, in a somewhat contradictory move, it seems they have dropped their ‘ESXi on a stick’ part and are recommending people buy either PNY USB devices or Kingston SD cards if you are using their latest ProLiant G6 hardware, which have SD slots onboard (way to follow Dell).

So I need to download VMware software from HP, but buy a part for a HP server from someone other than HP. ESXi Embedded is as good as dead as far as HP are concerned. And as for VMware maintaing separate documentation for “ESXi Embedded” versus “ESXi Installable”, well it hardly seems worth the effort.

Either HP see the future like I do (PXE booting ESXi, no need for any media), or someone in there has got things seriously messed up. I’m not confident it’s the former.