how to: Installing ESXi 5.5 on less than 2GB RAM

you may know i am trying to set up an esx lab at home. i was trying to do it with nested virtualisation but it wasnt working out very well so instead i dig up an old hp 7800 desktop that i had and slid the cd in.

and it wanted 4gb or ram instead of the 2gb i had. so searching around on the internet tubes i found this article

but it didnt fit my scenario exactly so i had to edit his steps a bit

• Boot the system from CD with the ESXi installer on it.
• Once the installer welcome screen shows up, press alt+1 (or alt+f1) to go to the first console (login prompt)
• Login as root, no password.
• # cd /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/utils
• There are a few files but the upgrade_precheck.py is of interest to us
• Delete upgrade_precheck.pyc (compiled version)
• Move upgrade_precheck.py to upgrade_precheck.py.old (because the file can not be edited due to some immortal flags and lack of tools to remove these flags)
• # cp upgrade_precheck.py.old > upgrade_precheck.py
• Edit upgrade_precheck.py and search for line that MEM_MIN_SIZE you will find (4 * 1024). Edit the number 4 to make it suitable for you. i changed it to 1
• List all processes (ps -c | grep install) and kill the installer by pid
• now in that console run the installer with /bin/install
• Continue as normal

and the install has completed.