manual dual boot ESXi and Windows

[WillL]

Hi,

With two hard drives, manually select boot sequence in BIOS, can ESXi and Windows 7 be installed on seperate hard drives and "coexist" in the same system without conflict? Which one should be installed first?

Thanks,

William

[cferran]

I am assuming that ESXi is superior to Workstation. I am assuming that having Win7 as a layer between the HW and the VMOS (Workstation) takes a considerable toll on the system. Am I incorrect in my assumption? If the only thing running on the Windows 7 machine is VMWare workstation would that system be as powerful and capable as one that is running ESXi? Of course I would have to disable all the power-saving options on Windows 7 to make sure that it does not bring the VMs down during sleep or other calm times.

[DSTAVERT]

If you need a powerful machine and need to run large scale applications in a production environment don't bother asking about dual booting. Get a dedicated machine for ESXi and a dedicated desktop machine. If you have enough processor (fast multicore) and lots of RAM (8 to 16GB is nice) you can have a very nice test / dev machine capable of running multiple OSs.

[cferran]

I built a nice white-box system (Asus Sabertooth X58, Intel Core i7-970 [6 cores] 24 GB RAM, 1 SSD HD, three 2TB HDs, Radeon HD 6870)). It gave me some headaches at the start due to the builtin NIC but I got an Intel NIC and got it to work. I was planning on using the three HDs in a RAID 5 setup but that does not seem to be feasible so now each disk is independent and I have plenty of HDs. During three month stretches I need to run several DB servers and clients in a production environment. And in between I have two months stretches when I do not need those servers and wanted to use it as my own station. Ideally I could create a VM as my own station but then I could not have dual monitors nor could I leverage the videocard (or is there a way to do that?). I am not looking to running games but I do a lot of video processing and certainly work with too many programs at the same time so the double monitor setup is a must.

[anthonyu]

have you tried installing ESXi on a USB key and change the boot device when you want to boot to ESXi and Windows? just to be safe, I would unplug the Windows OS drive before hand.

if you want to build your own "white box" a good site is vm-help.com

[realdreams]

I don't think you can even install ESXi 5.0u1 without a 64 bit processor.

Easiest way is 2 boot devices, one for each OS. ESXi image does not take much space. Or you can try auto deploy which can be a PITA for this kind of application. Boot from SAN is also indeed a great idea if you have the environment.