Update: I’ve determined that installing the F5 LTM VE on anything earlier than ESXi 4 is a major pain. I would recommend saving yourself the trouble of trying to hack it to work on ESXi 3.5 and just install on ESXi 4. See here…
I’ve had a recent hankering to get more practice with F5 gear. I knew they had a free trial of the LTM product that was a virtual appliance but I had never set it up before. As it turns out, the virtual appliance was a .OVA file type which wasn’t a import option on my ESXi3.5 host. I did some playing around and got it to install after awhile. Thought I’d share my steps just in case others hit the same road block…
1 – Download and install the VMWare Converter tool
2 – Click the ‘Convert Machine’ button to launch the wizard
3 – Specify the OVA file as the source, ESXi host as the destination
4 – Leave the rest of the options default
5 – Finish the wizard and let the tool run through the conversion
6 – When its done, the host should be visible in Infrastructure client
7 – Right click and edit the settings for the guest
8 – In the setting window select the SCSI Controller object on the left, and then click the ‘Change Type’ button on the right hand side of the screen.
9 – On the next window, change the controller to ‘LSI Logic’ and click OK.
10 – OK your way out of the open windows and fire up the guest machine. When you start the guest machine you will get a warning about changing the disk controller. Select ‘Yes’ and hit OK to boot the guest.
11 – With any luck, the guest will boot to the login prompt where you can start the base configuration.
