# Setting up a VMware Esxi 6.0 Virtual Server on OVH Hosting
**by:** Saurabh Nandu     **in:**  [General](https://www.systenics.com/blogs/category/general)     **tags:**  [*VMWare ESXI*](https://www.systenics.com/blogs/tag/vmware-esxi)
## Overview

We have been using dedicated server hosting for past couple of years. We
were happy using servers from [www.server4you.com](http://www.server4you.com/). Although they have a bit slow support, they have good dedicated
server offerings at bargain prices. Recently with our foray into the
open source space we needed couple of Linux servers too. After
struggling and hitting a roadblock with Server4you in trying to run
virtualization on their servers, we started to look for other options.
One of the strong contender we found was [OVH.com](http://ovh.com/). They have two other sister companies too, which provide bargain
servers.

In this blog post we try to highlight some of the challenges and
advantages that we faced while working with OVH. It took us several
hours trying to figure out different parts of the service and get it
functional. There have been several forum posts by others who have given
important information to help us configure our servers correctly. In
this blog post we are trying to string together our journey to make it
easier for others. We specialize in bespoke software development and are
not trained IT admins, but we definitely like to dabble into IT as far
as we can. We are sure someone with a strong IT experience in
virtualization might know these issues up front. But this is our
layman’s view of this process.

**Note:** This is not a paid review of OVH, this is just describing
our experience.

## Getting Started

There were two very key features offered by OVH which attracted us to
their servers. Firstly, bargain priced dedicated servers and secondly
ability to run virtualization platform on their servers. We have not
seen any other bargain provider giving such offerings, especially the
latter feature to allow us to directly host a virtualization platform on
their server. It was a good solution for our needs to host both
dedicated Windows and Linux virtual machines and that to at a bargain –
simply irresistible!

We picked the Enterprise SP-64 server with the following key specs:

- Intel Xeon E5-1620v2
- 64GB DDR ECC RAM
- 2x2 TB SATA3 (Software RAID)
- 500 Mbps bandwidth guarantee
- IP KVM
- 500 GB backup space
-
Ability to have public IP's at no monthly cost (one time fixed cost
of $3 applies)

The server was far more powerful than our current servers as well as had
enough hardware capabilities to host several Linux VM’s. Once we fixed
the server and purchased it, there came the first hurdle. They required
identity proof of our company and the individual purchasing, only after
identity verification the payment gets collected. It was late night, we
did not have my documents on hand. So the next morning, we emailed them
the documents. Within couple of hours, we got an confirmation to
purchase. Punch-in the credit card info and we hit hurdle number 2 (it’s
a regular occurring hurdle), all credit card payments are manually
authorized by their staff! Since we are based in Mumbai, India in GMT
+5:30 timezone, it usually takes a while before their staff gets to
approving our payment manually. We am not sure what policies have lead
them to make this a practice, but in todays rapid world waiting for
manual verification seems too much. It sucks all the excitement out of
the process as well as you waste days waiting on every step.

Finally, in couple of hours the payment got approved and a server got
assigned to us. OVH has a pretty mature control panel that lets to view
and control several aspects of your services. Its one of the most
detailed panel we have seen and are pretty happy with the control it
gives us.

Figure 1: OVH Hosting control panel.

## Hyper-V 2012 R2 Virtualization – a failed effort

As soon as we had access to the servers one of the first thing to do was
pick a virtualization platform. We have been using Hyper-V internally
and were pretty confortable with it so we went with it first. In the OVH
control panel (as shown above) you can click on the **System (OS)** spanner icon and choose an OS of your choice. They have several options
of base OS and virtualization platforms to choose. This is again a pretty
unique feature we have seen in their hosting and a pretty good one too. Installation
of Hyper-V server went smoothly and RDC credentials were sent via email. We
could remote into the server and get to the command prompt.

Internally we were used to using the RSAT tools for Windows 8.1 to
manage Hyper-V servers. We expected the same to work for this server,
but couple of hours of goggling solutions we figured out that RSAT tools
only work in Intranet environment. As soon as the server detects that it
is in a public internet environment RSAT tools do not work. We found a
workaround to remotely managing the server using [this guide written by Mark Thompson](http://www.markthompson.me.uk/post/setting-up-a-virtual-hosting-environment-for-30-a-month-with-so-you-start-and-hyper-v). Only difference we found that after we installed **chocolatey**, we could not install Google Chrome, so we installed Firefox and went
ahead with it. Another useful tool to download and install was [explorer plus plus](https://explorerplusplus.com/). It’s a free file manager and a good replacement for missing Windows
Explorer on the barebones Hyper-V server. Once FireFox was installed we
could download the Linux/Windows ISO of our choice and store it locally.
Then use the free [5Nine Hyper-V manager](http://www.5nine.com/5nine-manager-for-hyper-v-free.aspx) to create new virtual machines using that ISO. It was pretty straight forward
once the ISO was downloaded, to get a VM up and running. But that VM had no
internet connectivity. Unlike a local network with DHCP where new machines
can get IP Addresses assigned automatically, VM’s on the internet need public
static IP addresses if you wish to use them for hosting purposes. This is
where we had been stuck with server4you hosting in the past and were curious
to see if OVH had the right solution for this.

In order to assign public IP to your virtual machine you need to first
order it from OVH. OVH allows about 256 IP Addresses to be assigned to a
single machine at a one time setup cost. Although there is a cravat now
that ARIN has exhausted IPv4’s, you might have to first raise a support
ticket with OVH requesting them to allow you to purchase additional IP
addresses for your server. If they approve, then you need to go into the
OVH control panel –> IP –> Order Additional IP’s. This will open a
wizard asking you the number of IP’s you wish to purchase and the cost
for it. Remember you can only purchase as many IP’s as they OVH support
has enabled for your server. If you need more you need to contact their
support.

The same manual verification process follows after payment for IP’s, so
you need to wait till you payment is verified and the IP’s get assigned
to you. Once the new IP’s are assigned to you, in order to use them in
virtual machines you need to generate a Virtual MAC for them. In layman
terms, hosting companies configure their routers to ensure that the
public IP’s that they distribute is only assigned to their servers to
avoid abuse. They lock the IP address to a particular network MAC to
ensure only that machine can use the IP address. This was the same
problem we were facing with server4you hosting, the only difference in
OVH is that their control panel allows you to assign a Virtual Mac to
the IP address so that you can directly assign the IP address to the
virtual machine. This again is a very good feature in OVH, without this
there is no point of hosting VM’s because you will never be able to
assign them public IP’s.

Figure 2: Add Virtual MAC

Go the the **IP** section in the control panel, expand the new
IP’s you have received and click on the settings icon and select **Add a virtual MAC** from the context menu. A dialog similar to figure 2 is shown, select **Create a new Virtual MAC**. **Type** can be **OVH** for all other platforms,
only select **vmware** if you are using vmware esxi because it
requires virtual mac’s in a particular format. Then give the **name of the virtual machine** you will apply this IP to and click **Confirm**. This
will take a while and generate a MAC for your IP address.

Once you have generate the virtual MAC, use this [guide from OVH](http://docs.ovh.ca/en/guides-network-bridging.html#windows-server-2012-hyper-v) to setup static MAC for your Virtual Machine. Unfortunately for us, after
several tries and reboot we were never able to get the public IP working in
the VM. Nor we could get internet access for our VM’s. OVH only provides support
for their hardware and not for software configuration. We scanned the net
for different articles. The steps to take were redone couple of times. We
also went through re-install of Hyper-V and reconfiguration but no matter
what we were not able to get it working.

Online forums posts some users facing similar issues felt that there
were routing issues with OVH and it took ages for them to acknowledge or
fix. Several users had even cancelled their accounts because support was
not able to fix the issue. It was frustrating and we were dejected
thinking probably the offer was too good. The problem was that it was a
software configuration issue and OVH support only helps with hardware
issues and there was no clear forum answer too. Dejected, we clearly
failed in this configuration effort.

## VMWare ESXI 6.0 – A success

Going through the forum posts we read about several users who had been
successful in using OVH with VMWare ESXI. Although it was a new platform
for us, we wanted to give it a try since it pretty comparable to Hyper-V
in terms of performance and capabilities. As well as its free like the
Hyper-V server. Hence we went ahead and installed VMware ESXI 6.0 from
the OVH control panel using the default partition options. Once the
install was done OVH emailed us the link to the web interface for VMware
ESXI server which is basically the IP address of your server accessed
over HTTPS. This began our newbie journey in working with ESXI. We are
sure someone with VMWare ESXI experience will find our journey humorous
but our hope to to help those like us who do not have deep knowledge of
ESXI to get started with it.

Figure 3: VMWare Esxi 6.0 Web interface

VMWare provides a free windows tool vSphere client to manage the server.
Although the tool has several limitations and can’t access the latest
features provided by ESXI 6.0. There is a paid vCenter tool from VMWare
which allows which allows full management for ESXI, but we choose to
stick to the free tool for now. Click on the **Download vSphere Client for Windows** link from the webpage loaded from the link provided in OVH by email. Once
the vSphere client is installed start it and use the credentials for root
use provided in the OVH email to login to your ESXI server. The vSphere Windows
client lets to configure all basic parts of ESXI as well as allows you to
create and mange virtual machines.

Here again the challenge came of how to upload a Linux/Windows ISO to
ESXI to boot and create a VM. There are several solutions, some forum
posts suggested to ssh into esxi server and then using command line
tools to download the iso’s. But its pretty hard to find direct links to
ISO installers and we did not want to muck around in ssh until we knew
what we were doing.

Figure 4: vSphere Client Summary tab

The other way to to upload an image using vSphere client. First download
the appropriate ISO to your local machine. Then use the vSphere to
upload the image. In vSphere client, go to the **Summary** tab
and right-click on **datasource1** (highlighted in Figure 4 above)
under **Storage** section and select **Browse Datastore** from the context menu. Note: you might not see **backupstore** under storage section like figure 4, we will talk about it a bit later.

Figure 5: Datastore Browser

In the **Datastore Browser**, click the **Add Folder** icon to create a new folder called **Installer** (you can name
it whatever you like). Note: On a new server there will not be any folders
created like shown in Figure 5.

Then double click on the newly created Installer folder to open it. Then
click on the Upload file/Folder icon (circled in red in Figure 5) and
select a local ISO to upload and click OK. Then wait for the ISO to
upload. It could take a long time depending on your upload connection
speed. Usually DSL connections have a higher download but a very low
upload speed, so it could take ages. Luckily we had our existing
dedicated server running, so we installed vSphere client on it and
uploaded the ISO’s from there. It was a much faster and pain free
process. You could use an Azure or Amazon Vm for some time to just
upload the ISO and then shut them down once you are done if your upload
bandwidth is crappy.

Once you have the ISO uploaded you can use the **Create a new Virtual Machine** wizard from the vSphere client to go ahead and create new virtual machines
as required. We would also suggest that before you power up you new VM, you
also generate a new virtual mac for the IP in OVH (as described above) but
this time choose the VMware option which generating the virtual mac to make
it vmware compatible. Then go under network settings for the vm and assign
a the generated static virtual mac as shown in [this guide](http://ask.xmodulo.com/static-mac-address-vmware-esxi-virtual-machine.html). Either during installation or post installation you can follow [this guide from OVH](http://docs.ovh.ca/en/guides-network-bridging.html) to assign the static IP to the virtual machine. Once you correctly assign
the virtual MAC as well as the static IP the vm should be able to access the
internet as well as you should be able to ping into the vm’s static IP address.
This approach worked well for us and we continue to use this deployment. There
were a couple of more things that we needed to setup to complete our installation.

## ESXI 6.0 – Add a free license

The VMWare ESXI 6.0 installed by default has a 60 day trial period and
it needs a free license from VMWare to be installed. You can follow [this guide](http://www.vladan.fr/apply-vmware-free-license-vmware-esxi/) to generate and install a free ESXI license (please skip the part of the
guide which relates to download and install of ESXI since we already have
it installed)

## Restrict Access to ESXI

As we were working with our new server, we found one day that we were no
longer able to login into server. No one had changed the passwords, but
the vSphere client would simply refuse to login. Worried we used the OVH
control panel to reboot the server (a good feature from OVH which allows
quick automated reboots) and were able to login post the reboot. On
looking at the event logs in vSphere client we found that someone had
started to attack our vmware server by running a password list, and due
to failed password attempts the root account was being locked out.
Googling we found that root account on ESXI 6.0 can’t be disabled and
this is a [common problem](http://www.v-front.de/2015/04/watch-out-esxi-60-introduces-root.html). So we suggest you use [this guide](http://www.v-front.de/2014/04/protect-your-esxi-hosts-against.html) to configure ESXI to only accept connections from your IP addresses. There
might be several other ways to secure your ESXI, but we found this one to
be good enough to meet our needs.

## Setting up Backup datastore

One of the neat features which OVH provides is 500gb of backup disk
space. Not only that, it allows FTP, NFS and CIFS access to the backup
storage so that you can easily configure it as a network drive in ESXI
as well as from within your VM clients. [Follow this detailed guide](http://docs.ovh.ca/en/services-backup-storage.html) from OVH to configure your backup space as well as to allow your new Public
IP’s to have access to the backup storage. You will receive an email with
the FTP username, password and servername of the backup once its created,
please refer to the email to configure further. Once backup is configured
in the vSphere client go to **Configuration** tab and click on
**Storage** under **Hardware**. Then click **Add Storage** to bring up the Add Storage wizard as shown in Figure 6. Select **Network File System** option and click next.

Figure 6: Add Storage wizard step 1

Figure 7: Add Storage Wizard step2

On refer to the email with ftp details of you backup space to get the
access details. In step 2 of the Add Storage wizard fill the following
information:

-  **Server**: The FTP server name given in your email

-  **Folder**: /export/ftpbackup/login – Where login is
given in your email

-  **Datastore Name**: This can be anything you want

Clicking on **Next** will allow you to add the backup storage
as an NFS datasource for ESXI. Once this is setup you can move files to the
backupstore using the** Browse Datastore** popup from the summary
page.

## Conclusion

This blog post has tried to highlight our journey in setting up VMWare
ESXI 6.0 on OVH hosting server. We hope that this post helps those who
are new to OVH hosting and makes it easier for them to setup their
server. VM backups is one major area we have not yet explored and are
currently relying on each client VM backing up its data to the backup
storage. But eventually we will have to figure backup for VM’s and that
should serve as a new blog post.