Dual boot ESXi 5 and Windows 7 ??

[LazyD]

Hi,

Have a laptop that I would like to use as a lab for ESXi. I've installed ESXi on it and it worked fine, vsphere connected fine from another pc and seems to work properly.

The laptop has a 1TB hard drive, laptop is a standard one that only has one physical hard drive.

What I would like to know is, can I dual boot Windows 7 and ESXi? If I split the hard drive in 2, so roughly 500GB each partition, can I use one for Windows 7 and one for ESXi (with datastore and space for VMs)?

If so, can someone please advise on how I do that or point me in the right direction.

Thanks.

[a_p_]

It might be possible to make this work by installing and booting ESXi from an USB stick rather than the HDD. ESXi needs to create a couple of partitions on the installation disk so you may not be able to install another OS too.

Anyway, since this is meant as a lab, why don't you install VMware Workstation in your Windows OS and run ESXi as a VM? This works perfectly (assuming the host supports VT-x), see e.g. Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab and you can even manage the virtual ESXi host(s) from the Windows OS on the same laptop.

André

[continuum]

The easiest approach is to boot the ESXi from USB-stick or a LiveCD and then use one primary partition of the notebook drive for the VMFS.
That way it does not produce a problem with the Windows 7 installation.

It is also possible to install it to disk directly but that is way more advanced and does not really make sense - the USB way is so much easier

[LazyD]

Thanks for your replies.

I initially thought that it wouldn't work with USB as I tried to install ESXi to an SD card I had but it couldn't see it (no options in BIOS to allow boot to SD card). But the ESXi installer did see a USB stick I tested with so I'm going to take your advice and install it to USB.

Couple of things, I didn't know you can boot ESXi from a live cd, does anyone actually do this in production? Is there a big performance hit?

Is there a performance hit when booting ESXi from USB compared with HD?

Does ESXi support hosting on a USB 3 memory stick?