ESX as a VM on an ESX host

[tjbackstage]

I am currently trying to install ESX as a VM on an ESX host. I have a couple of hosts to potentially put this VM on: two running 4.0, one running 4.1. I would like to run this VM on the host running 4.1, and the VM needs to run 4.0. Through my documentation and compatibility searches, I have found that ESX is not supported as an OS to run in a VM under ESX, but it is for Workstation and Fusion. I have read on some blogs that installing ESX as a VM on an ESX host is possible (at least on older versions) but comes with some problems, which do have work-arounds. I have found (external) posts regarding doing this all with 4.0, but my preference would be to do this with 4.1 on the host and 4.0 on the VM. I can't find anything about doing this with 4.1 though, which isn't surprising considering that the upgrade became available less than two weeks ago. Has anybody tried doing this yet? Is there anything you've found or would recommend as I approach doing this? (I've read that the VM needs to be configured as a VM running RHEL 5 with 2GB RAM http://when this is all done with version 4.0, but I haven't been able to find much more.) Thanks in advance for any help and suggestions!

[DSTAVERT]

Welcome to the forums. While it may not have direct support it does work. VMware themselves use it all the time. You must have a host server that has hardware virtualization support. The virtual ESX guests will not be able to run 64bit guests. You should be able to use any guides for installing on ESX 4.0

[f10 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Yes, I have tried this last week and it worked for me. You are on the right track, we need to select RHEL 5 64-bit as O.S and assign 2GB ram and in addition to his you may have to use E1000 nics for the installation to complete.

FYI, this configuration is not supported/tested/certified by VMware.

Hope this information helps

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[tjbackstage]

Thanks. The only thing I could find through 20 pages of Google and BING searches was a small blog post that went over exactly what you mentioned. There was also a helpful snippet regarding what you have to do to get VMs running on the ESX guest VM. This process ended up being much simpler than expected!