Tag: uefi

ESXi with UEFI iSCSI boot on Raspberry Pi

Posted on by Bian Xi Leave a Comment on ESXi with UEFI iSCSI boot on Raspberry Pi

ESXi with UEFI iSCSI boot on Raspberry Pi

Steps

Setup iSCSI disk

  • Create iSCSI Target and LUN in Synology
  • Download RPi4 UEFI Firmware, and unzip it to a SD card which formatted as FAT32 partition
  • Boot from the SD card, and perform following tasks using UEFI menu
    • Disable 3G memory limit
      Device Manager => Raspberry Pi Configuration => Advanced Configuration => Limit RAM to 3 GB)
    • Create device which mapped to iSCSI target
      Device Manager => iSCSI Configuration => Add an Attempt

After Attempt 1 created, Reset (restart) Raspberry Pi. Now, in Boot Manager, should see UEFI SYNOLOGY iSCSI Storage.

Setup boot order

  • Change Boot order and let it before other network boot, otherwise, there will be too much waiting time.

Prepare ESXi installation disk

  • Download and flush VMware-VMvisor-Installer-7.0.0-xxxx.aarch64.iso to USB device

Install ESXi

  • Reset (Reboot) again, and in UEFI menu select boot from USB device
  • Then perform ESXi installation, and select iSCSI disk as target

After installation completed, take out ESXi installation USB, then another reset is required,

Configure ESXi

  • Boot into iSCSI
  • Change ESXi name, etc.

Troubleshooting

Unable to see iSCSI disk in Boot Manager

Most likely is the iSCSI configuration wrong.

  • Check iSCSI Target Name
  • Check iSCSI Target IP
  • Check iSCSI LUN ID (This issue costed me a few hours)
  • Check User/Password

Synchronous Exception

After installation complete, suddenly cannot boot into any destination, and just show error Synchronous Exception.

End up, I have to recopy UEFI image into micro SD card, redo iSCSI configuration. Luckily the iSCSI has no issue, which contains installed ESXi image.

References

Boot ESXi-Arm Fling on a Raspberry Pi 4 Using ISCSI
Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI Firmware Images
ESXi on Arm 10/22 更新
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GBにESXi for ARM 7.0.0をインストール
Synchronous Exception at 0x00000000371013D8 #97

FreeNAS USB Drive Installation

Posted on by Bian Xi Leave a Comment on FreeNAS USB Drive Installation

FreeNAS USB Drive Installation

In order to fully utilize system by FreeNAS, also like to test whether similar hanging issue happened when directly installed on USB drive without ESXi, installation had been done with following steps.

Create on USB drive from ISO image

Creating USB drive on Mac using steps mentioned below.

Preparing the Media

Using rdiskX, which is raw device (not read-only device), will be faster as mentioned in the instructions.

dd if=FreeNAS-9.3-RELEASE-x64.iso of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=64k

Boot from USB drive

Boot from the USB drive created above, and another USB drive will be used for installation.

Select BIOS mode

By choosing BIOS instead of UEFI, the PC bios could not set as auto boot from USB drive, but it can be chosen for manual boot. So choose UEFI mode instead.

Secure Boot in PC bios also requires to be set to Other OS instead of Windows UEFI, otherwise, following error will occurre.

System found unauthorized changes on the firmware error...

Configure network

To set aggragation mode, two original interfaces which had configured, will not be displayed in aggragation menu.

IP address will be configured on aggragation interface.