Just to follow up on the post about Serial console over IPMI: The ESX(i) supports serial console, but you have to configure it under “Configuration –> Advanced Settings –> VMKernel –> Boot”. I didn’t get a real console on the VMware ESXi (I didn’t try to hard neither), but I got the debug output from the kernel which should be enough if things are working properly. Later on I might try to find out how I get a real, input enabled console so that I for example can remotely change the IP address on the management interface since it is reported that the kernel might change interface names during upgrades which makes the service console unavailable.