Firstly grab a copy of the 64bit Ubuntu server ISO from the ubuntu website and store is somewhere you can get to from your ESX box. Over the years I have taken the approach of storing server VMDK’s on ESX’s local hard disk pushing installation media onto a NAS.

(Note: Earlier this year we went gigabit ethernet on the NAS LAN so plans are there to potentially store VM’s a NAS too).

Install the virtual machine as you would do normally. I selected 64bit Ubuntu – I’m finding that telling ESX the O/S is a 64bit version regardless of whether you actually install the 64bit version or not seems to make the virtual machine more stable.

Edit the VM and set the boot media to be the Ubuntu ISO you downloaded ealier and mark it as connected and connected on boot.

Run the installation as you would do on normal hardware.

Now it’s time to install VMWare tools.

From the VMWare menu select Install/Upgrade VMWare Tools.

Mount the media and extract the installation files into /tmp

mount /cdrom
cd /tmp
tar zxf /media/cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz

As part of the installation some compiling needs to be done so we’ll need to put some source libraries on unless they’re already there.

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

The config.h file whilst needed is not created by default so an empty one is created so the build will complete.

sudo touch /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r`/include/linux/config.h

(Thanks https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware for the tip on this).

cd vmware-distribution
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Follow the prompts for the installation – shared folders fails to build but in the ESX environment they’re not essential.

Reboot the box and you are in buisiness.