Reinstall of Tintri OS

[DocSnibble]

I found a cheap Tintri VMStore T5080 Appliance on Ebay for my homelab. At the moment I use a Synology NAS (RS3617rpxs) as iSCSI Storage for my VMs. The solution works, but is not optimal because of the lack of redundant controllers.

Unfortunately, the Tintri was delivered without an operating system. Consequently, I contacted the support to get access to the required materials. I was then told that I needed an active support contract so that they could help me. However the device will no longer be supported in less than a year (end of life) and I would have to pay the last two years retroactively in which the device was inactive.

Lets say I got the installation files anyway … I still am unable to install the OS.

Now to my question: Does anybody have experience in installing a Tintri device and may help me? I suspect that I have to change some bios settings, because the battery was empty and all the settings got reset.
I get to the point where the rpm file gets copied and validated. After that a bunch of errors get spit out.

It would be a shame if a perfectly fine appliance couldn’t be used.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you in advance!

[techyes]

Hey Doc,
I know nothing about Tintri. I did a quick search and can’t find the actual specs (motherboard vendor) of the system. Many of these providers use servers/hardware that have been rebranded from big OEMs like SuperMicro, etc. It might be a standard product with just a fancy front bezel.

My recommendation would be to forget whatever is actually installed on the system right now and try to install something like Proxmox if your goal is really lots of VMs. If the sytem has multi-nodes it could also be setup as a proxmox cluster. Or, TrueNAS scale / core if you need storage & VMs.

Both of these options could cost nothing and you could end up with something great! You might even get more features than it originally would have had and both are still fully supported, security patched, improving features, etc.