Is running multiple OS's from their physical locations feasible?

[anga1010]

Do not ask why!!

On the same PC,
1. Install Windows 7 on disk 1
2. Remove disk 1. insert disk 2
3. Install Windows XP on disk 2
4. Remove disk 2. insert disk 3
5. Install Ubuntu on disk 3
and so on.....
Now I have different OS's on different disks and all installed on the same PC.

Now insert disk 0 and install ESXi 4 or 4.1 or 5
Shutdown PC and install disks 1, 2, 3, 4, .....

Can I run the different OS's from their physical locations from within ESXi?

Is this possible? If so, how can I make it work?

[AndySimmons]

You can try the steps detailed here, to create the VMs using raw device mappings to the appropriate physical disks.

The problem is that these operating systems will be booting up in a virtual machine after having been installed on physical hardware, and will likely be very unstable as a result. However, raw device mappings will allow you to attempt the steps you described.

[golddiggie]

IMO, you're going about it all wrong. If you don't have a supported RAID controller (hardware RAID) then either use the drives as lone datastores/LUNs for the VM's you want, or use RDM for the drives and install from within ESXi. Trying to do what you're describing is probably going to give you shotty (or sh!tty) performance at best. Plus, you'll have several operating systems calling their drives the main/C drive even though they are not. IMO, a mess of sheit that can be easily avoided.

Once you have ESXi installed on the physical system, connect to it via the vSphere Client application and start building the VM's.

Personally, I'm not even using any spindles inside my ESXi host server (at home). All my VM's reside on my SAN/NAS with LUNs carved out of it for use. I boot the host from an 8GB USB flash drive, which works really well. I used the 8GB flash drive so that it would make a scratch partition on the flash drive (needs 4GB of free space for that, and since there's nothing between 4GB and 8GB for flash drives, I went with the 8GB). If you don't have the option of setting up a SAN/NAS then use the drives you have in the host. But, I would still install ESXi onto a flash drive. This way, if/when you have a hard drive failure, your host will continue to function. Of course, this IS why I also highly recommend getting a hardware RAID controller (on the VMware HCL) and set up the drives at least with RAID 5, if not RAID 10. This way, no single drive will F up either any VM's.

[AndySimmons]

golddiggie wrote:

IMO, you're going about it all wrong.

I completely agree. And the OP telling us not to ask why severely limits the help we can provide.