vCenter 4.1 in ESXi4.1 in Fusion 3.1?

[nouveaux]

Back in the "good old days" (a couple of months ago now), I had the following running on my 17" MBP (2.6GHz Core Duo, 4GB RAM, 10.6.4):

• Fusion 3.0

• ESXi 4.0 Update 0 as a VM inside of Fusion

• Windows 2003 Server (Standard Edition, 32-bit) with vCenter 4.0 Update 0 as a VM inside of ESi

At the time, the only real problem I had was trying to run all of this and a second ESXi 4.0 server so that I could demo/test VMotion and friends. I never expected fast, and it all probably would have worked had I had enough RAM.

Since then I've upgraded my MBP to have an internal 1TB drive and 6GB of RAM (I know the RAM is not supported, but it works great).

Now I'm trying to get:

• Fusion 3.1

• ESXi 4.1 as a VM inside of Fusion

• Windows 2003 Server (Enterprise, 64-bit) with vCenter 4.1as a VM inside of ESXi

No joy.

I can't even boot the Windows 2003 VM inside of ESXi to install Windows. When I try, I get the following error:

msg.cpuid.noLongmodeQuestionFmt: This virtual machine is configured for 64-bit guest operating systems. However, 64-bit operation is not possible.
This host does not support VT.
For more detailed information, see http://vmware.com/info?id=152
Continue without 64-bit support?

Continuing without 64-bit support is not really an option as vCenter 4.1 requires a 64-bit Windows OS. I've tried the advanced settings "Preferred virtualization engine" "Intel VT-x" and "Intel VT-x with EPT" both with no joy (I'm guessing the laptop CPU, being a 2.5 year-old laptop CPU does not provide VT hardware assist.

My questions are:

Has anyone gotten this sort of a setup to work on any Mac (not just my laptop model)?

Is there a(n unsupported) hack which might make this work on my laptop (I will leave no hack untried.

Thanks.

[admin · Accepted solution]

You can't run a nested 64-bit guest because we need VT-x to run 64-bit guests, but we do not virtualize VT-x (it's really hard). However, Fusion will run your Win2k3 vCenter virtual machine just fine, which is what I would recommend. Any reason you want to run VC nested?

[nouveaux]

Thanks for the reply!

And I have no clue why it didn't occur to me to just run the Windows 2003 VM directly under Fusion. I had no particular reason for running the vCenter VM neste. Running it directly under Fusion will work just fine! Must have been a senior moment. Duh.

Again, thanks!

[admin]

No problem. I saw someone else asking the same question recently, so I was wondering if there was a document floating around or something.

In general, running nested virtual machines results in poor performance and only adds benefits in a handful of scenarios (e.g. if you want to play with vMotion). In general try to keep everything at one level of virtuallization.

[nouveaux]

No document floating about anywhere that I'm aware. It was just a (lame) idea on my part. Back to the (mostly) single level of virtualization!