Bypassing the memory check on a VMware ESXi 5

Posted by Dave on 6 December 2013

When my new HP ML10 arrived I was ready to install ESXi… until I realised that my 32GB of RAM wouldn’t be on its way for a week! To get around the memory check in ESXi 5.5, I found the awesome instructions here and with a few tweaks was able to get this working. Here are the 20 steps that I followed…

  1. Boot the system from USB Stick with ESXi installer on it.
  2. Once the installer welcome screen shows up, press ALT+F1
  3. Login as “root”, no password.
  4. cd /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/util
  5. Delete upgrade_precheck .pyc (compiled version)
  6. Move precheck.py to precheck.py.old
  7. cp upgrade_precheck.py.old upgrade_precheck.py
  8. chmod 666 upgrade_precheck.py
  9. vi upgrade_precheck.py
  10. Type “/MEM_MIN” and press ENTER
  11. Press “i” for insert
  12. Edit the line to read “MEM_MIN_SIZE= (1*1024–32)”
  13. Press ESC and then type “:w” and ENTER
  14. Press ESC and then type “:q!” and ENTER
  15. ps -c | grep weasel
  16. Note the process id for “python”
  17. kill –9 /<process_id/>
  18. This put me back at the main screen, but you can jump back pressing ALT+F2 if necessary
  19. Continue the install process
  20. Fin