ESX 4 and vMotion over VMWare Workstation

[Baadil]

Hi,

I am trying to create a test setup using ESX 4 over VMWare Workstation 7. So far I have ESX 7 running successfully on the workstation and I have create a VM within ESX as well. All is well.

Now, I would like to work with vMotion and Fault Tolerance funtionality of ESX. For this, I need to create another ESX server. My question is, can I simply close my first one and then change the name/IP or Do I need to reinstall it from scratch again? Also, how do I do about creating and using a shared disk with this setup. I have used shared disks in the past with MS Clustering but in that setup cluster service keeps track of the shared resources but I don't know how to set this up in ESX.

Any help, links, papers, etc would be great.

Thank you.

[FranckRookie]

Hi,

I don't know if you can clone an ESX as a VM because you have devices with unique identifiers like the local datastore. But it costs nothing to try. Installing an ESX is so quick...

If you want to build a cluster, you will also need to install a vCenter. And for the shared storage, an easy solution is to use a VM with a software storage application able to share its disks over NFS or iSCSI. The easier (and free) ones are OpenFiler and FreeNas.

You should find some documents on the Net about such lab configs.

Good luck

Regards

Franck

[Baadil]

Franck,

Thank you for a quick response.

For shared storage, I am planning on using a virtual disk from VMWare Workstation instead of a physical disk. I am trying to keep the whole environment self contained / portable on my laptop. Any ideas on creating a shared disk in VMWare workstation to be used for ESX 7?

[FranckRookie]

I would have suggested installing a virtual storage appliance to be close to a real configuration. But I found this article about sharing a vmdk. I don't know if it will work four your configuration because it's a bit old, but you can give it a try.

Regards

Franck

[Baadil]

Thank you, I will give it a try.