Once we downloaded the VA we clicked a link in VIC to 'Import an appliance' (see above). Unfortunately this link didn't work in our test setup, so we used VIC's File\ Virtual Appliance Import option instead. This started a wizard that imported the appliance from our Windows desktop to the ESX 3i server.
We used the VA version of RCLI (Remote Command-Line Interface), which is a Linux-based virtual machine.
The VA version of the RCLI package is actually a Linux VM, which we booted by clicking on its 'Start' button shown in the VIC console. As this was the first time we had run it, we needed to click on a tab in the VIC console to show the Linux VM's screen (see above), and from there read and accept a licence agreement and enter a password for the RCLI system.
ESX 3i in operation
The RCLI allowed us to perform many of the operations available with the ESX Server 3 service console, such as starting and stopping VMs. A few of the popular service console commands required an update to work in the ESX 3i environment. For example, esxtop has been replaced by resxtop, and useradd is replaced by vicfg-user.pl. However, RCLI commands can be used in scripts that run on ESX Server 3i and ESX Server 3.5 hosts. Thus RCLI provides a way to manage several ESX-based systems from a single workstation, so it should make it easier to manage ESX farms than using the older service console approach.
For the most part though, VIC makes it very easy to manage all aspects of an ESX 3i server and most system administrators will normally use VIC to manage VMs running on 3i systems. VIC is also used to manage ESX Servers, either operating in isolation or as part of a VirtualCenter Server farm. Anyone familiar with VirtualCenter or with standalone ESX Server systems will find the switch to 3i extremely easy. In fact, you need to dig deep into the darkest corners of VIC to find any significant differences between managing 3i or ESX servers.
VIC makes it very easy to manage all aspects of an ESX 3i server.
One difference worth mentioning is that that the LUN holding the ESX 3i software was formatted with the VMFS 3.31 file system and all but 500MB of the capacity of this disk was available for us to store VMs. Traditional ESX Server systems store the hypervisor in the Linux Console Operating file system, which is not used to store VMs. The Thin ESX Installer had also formatted our empty 200GB LUN with VMFS 3.31, but had left the 67GB LUN containing our factory installation of Windows untouched. To all intents and purposes though, ESX 3i provides the same capabilities as the older ESX Server software. Consequently anyone familiar with the older VMware product range will find 3i straightforward to install and use.
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In the first page of this article you have the following statement: "Hyper-V sits on top of Windows" This is incorrect. The Hypervisor in Hyper-V is a thin layer of code that sits between the hardware and the OS and actually loads before Windows does. Please see the following article to make sure you understand the Hyper-V architecture.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768520.aspx