I wanted to call out this post. The vsim for Data Ontap 8.2RC1 has recently came out and I was wanting to run it as a VM (several of them actually, on ESX) to simulate a 4-node cluster mode. The documentation says we need ESX 4.1 but I tried to spin it up in my ESX 5.1 environment anyway, figuring why not, since it is new.
Turns out it errors out with something about it not being able to find DataOntap-sim.vmdk, even though it is clearly in the same directly. On a hunch, I figured it was probably because of the ESX 4.1 requirement.
Well, 4.1 is kind of old news, but I had an extra host laying around, so I figured it to be a good idea to spin it up. Problem: CD Drive is broken and I do not have a PXE environment setup….even though it is also not supported in 4.1.
This brings me to the above mentioned post, and is why I make blog posts of my own of the things I run into, one day it may actually help someone as the above post did for me. It describes how to make a USB drive bootable and how to lay out the files from a 4.1 install image and what to modify. In fact, I remember hitting just about all the errors mentioned in that post. One note I can add is you must pay attention to the SYSLINUX version that ESX boots up with (mine was 4.03). You can not take, for instance, the SYSLINUX 5.0 menu.c32 & mboot.c32 and think it will magically work. You will still get the COM32 errors until you get the right version for what is on the boot media. Perhaps it goes without saying, but I know I made the mistake and probably will not be the last!
This is a thank you to the above posting, it saved me a lot of trouble getting 4.1 running again in my lab.