Disclaimer: This is a personal document and is not official or endorsed by VMware. Feedback and suggestions are welcome. People who are experienced with ESX(i), especially in a virtual machine, are encouraged to update this document.

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Introduction

VMware recently released ESXi as a free product. Think of ESXi as an operating system designed and optimized to do exactly one thing: run virtual machines. Unlike VMware Fusion, which is a hosted product, ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor. ESXi is more restrictive about what hardware it can install on, but offers higher performance than our hosted products.

While it's not a good idea to run nested virtual machines, running ESXi in Fusion can be useful for learning or demonstrations. Be sure that you come into this with the right expectations, though - running in Fusion is not going to be anywhere near as fast as running on native hardware. Also keep in mind that I'm not an ESX expert, so some explanations might be off. Although this guide is written for Fusion, it should be applicable to other VMware products as well.

Note: Fusion 3.0 makes it easier to run ESXi. Choosing the VMware ESX/ESX Server 4.0 guest type sets all the necessary defaults.

Note: This document is currently a barebones sketch, intended to get people up and running quickly. I tested with Fusion 2.0b1 (89933) and ESXi 3.5U2 (103909).

Difficulty Level

Advanced: You should be familiar with editing .vmx files and be experienced with creating and using virtual machines, and preferably other VMware products. Additionally, the group of people interested in doing this in the first place is expected to be power users.

Requirements

• ESXi iso image
• 64-bit dual-core Mac (or better)
• 2 GB RAM (ESXi seems to want at least 1 GB)
• Windows (for VI Client)

Prepare

Create a new virtual machine for ESXi using the iso image. ESXi isn't based on any other operating system (it's our own proprietary kernel), so select Other/Other 64-bit as the Guest OS type. Unfortunately, ESXi's hardware requirements are stricter than the default Other/Other 64-bit virtual hardware, so we need to make some changes before we can power it on.

1. Disable 3D acceleration and printing passthrough. I don't know if they hurt, but they're certainly not going to help.
2. Change to 2 vCPUs and (at least) 1 GB RAM.
3. Delete the default IDE vmdk.
4. Quit Fusion, we need to edit the .vmx file
5. Create an LSIlogic .vmdk in the .vmwarevm bundle, e.g. `/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmware-vdiskmanager -c -s 10GB -a lsilogic -t 1 ESXi.vmdk`
6. Add the following to the .vmx file:

scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.fileName = "ESXi.vmdk"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = "TRUE"
monitor.virtual_exec = "hardware"

You can also do some cleanup, such as deleting the IDE disk.

Note: For older versions of VMware products, monitor.virtual_exec = "hardware" used to be monitor_control.vt32 = "TRUE"

TODO: cover other setup, e.g. host-only network for VIClient

Install

Install should be straightforward at this point. ESXi will attempt to put the network adapter in promiscuous mode, which will cause Fusion to prompt you for admin access. TODO: add more details

When it's done, you can customize the setup (e.g. select a root password).

Install VMware Infrastructure Client

From a Windows computer (possibly a virtual machine), use your web browser of choice to connect to the IP shown on the ESXi console. This will download the VMware Infrastructure Client, which is used to manage ESX servers. Run the setup.



TODO: Check if VIClient works in WINE, I hear it does.
TODO: Instructions to enter license
TODO: Write up how to create a virtual machine using VICllient.
TODO: Point out some features, such as resource allocation

Further Resources

TODO: put in some stuff about ESX, Virtual Center, etc.