These are notes on running OpenWrt on Vmware on the intel generic platform. Googling didn't produce a hit till today in another search for info to address problems and setup with vmware and openwrt. Specifically I need to run it on ESXI, and it doesn't support any disk controller other than SCSI.
So far copying the images to the IDE or SATA primary device 0, as recommended in most web pages on running on Intel just isn't working. The boot hangs with the Linux kernel attempting to do the open of the root device, or in another variation which happened on Vmware Fusion, it misidentified and annoyed a USB disk that was configured on the machine but offline as the root.
So this page has a lot of nice info to try.
Also has a nifty utility I didn't know about from the QEMU folks to take a disk image and zap it straight to a vmware VMDK. That basic trick is done, now I have to move it to vmware and try it as described.
If it works will add notes here on how to complete the operation by moving it to a datastore and registering it. ESXI and brethren require an incantation to "register" the storage media and not just dump the vmdk there. It is covered in another note, but I'll update the whole procedure here.
http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/vmware
Update: older howto in the OpenWrt Wiki for running Kamikaze release:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/oldwiki/RunningKamikazeOnVMwareHowTo
From OpenWrt pages:
OpenWRT Barrier_Breaker 14.07 on VMWare ESXi HowTo
This article describes how to use OpenWRT Barrier Breaker 14.07 under VMWare virtualisation.
Tested with: Barrier Breaker 14.07 in combination with VMWare ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Build 2068190
Things you need:
- Linux machine with qemu-utils & gunzip installed
- VMWare ESXi installation
First of all, you need to download the openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext4.img.gz on Linux. After that you extract & convert it to a vmdk image:
gunzip openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext4.img.gz qemu-img convert -f raw openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext4.img -O vmdk openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext4.vmdkafter that, just create a new VM in ESXi with "Linux\Other Linux 32-bit" with LSI BUS Logic & add the vmdk there. Use 1000e Network adapters.
Note from Iben Rodriguez:
https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/vmware
I have a link to cc 1505 OVA file you can download from my dropbox - it's listed here: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/vmware
I just tried it again and it does boot up on ESX. I'd like to refresh it with a newer build but ran out of time. Here's a link to the screenshot - one note - not sure if it's important - I used a machine type of freebsd. https://www.dropbox.com/s/cvaqyswbmn27qfw/Screenshot%202016-07-29%2019.35.54.png?dl=0
