I started by building a small system (codenamed “Toothless”) using a Asrock Deskmini 300W (https://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/DeskMini%20X300%20Series/index.asp), AMD 5600G APU and 16 Gb of memory with a 1 Tb SSD. I decided to go with VMware vSphere Hypervisor 8 (ESXi 8.0) as the virtualization platform because of the real world use case and the recommendation from a networking professional friend of mine.

ESXi 8.0 Installation:

This process took longer than expected due to some quirks with VMware. Acquiring an .iso file was simple (despite having to wait a few hours for download eligibility evaluation). From there I used Rufus (https://www.microsoft.com/store/productid/9PC3H3V7Q9CH?ocid=pdpshare) to prepare the installation media on a USB flash drive to then insert into my machine.

After changing the boot priority in the BIOS I was met with an error indicating that a network adapter was not detected (preventing the installation from proceeding). After some research online I found that my systems native networking chipset (RealTek RTL8111H) was incompatible with VMware. Even after reviewing VMware’s documentation regarding chipset compatibility (https://flings.vmware.com/usb-network-native-driver-for-esxi#requirements) it was unclear which specific network adapter I needed. It was not until I stumbled upon an article on William Lam’s website that I found specific and verified adapter recommendations (https://williamlam.com/2022/02/usb-network-adapters-without-using-the-usb-network-native-driver-for-esxi.html). Using a Belkin USB-C to 1GbE Adapter the ESXi 8.0 the installation was able to proceed.

Even though the installation halted at 73%, rebooting the system got me into the DCUI where I was prompted to set my credentials. The next troubleshooting hurdle occurred when I went to Customize System and saw that all options regarding the “Management Network” were greyed out. The resolution to this was simple despite having spent hours reviewing forum posts and reaching out to some tech savvy friends. All I needed to do was restore network settings and the network management options were made available. At this point I went to IPV4 configuration and set my IP address to static. Finally, this system could operate “headless”; in this case “Toothless”.

Linux & Red Bot:

Taking the above steps allowed me to access the system through VMware using a browser. The first thing I did was spin up my first virtual machine by installing Ubuntu 20.04.02 (Jammy Jellyfish) and allocating 2 Gb of memory, 2 CPU’s and 10 Gb of storage. Immediately after, I followed a guide to setup Red Bot in my discord server (https://github.com/Cog-Creators/Red-DiscordBot). In order to make this process easier, I used the remote connection manager mRemoteNG (https://mremoteng.org) where I was able to SSH into my VM and work through the bot setup from there.