ESXi

So I had a vision that I could build a server in the following setup, using the free Vsphere hyper-visor.

(2 Drives) RAID 1 - Windows 8 w/ the Vsphere installed on same drives

1 Drive - No RAID - Virtual Machine Files

1 Drive - No RAID - Data

I anticipated the management piece being done on the Windows 8 side and wanted to keep virtual machine files on one drive, and data on a different one.  Seemed fairly smart.  I'm clearly not a user of VMWare (yet), but am trying to get acclimated to it.  I've been using Hyper-V for awhile, and am just wanting to expand my knowledge.  When I install Vsphere it creates the the hypervisor and boots fine, shows me the management network to get to it, but if that is all I put on those two drives in the RAID 1, it seems like a large waste of space....

What am I missing?  Can I have Windows 8 and vSphere on the same RAID1 drives? 

One day I will look back and laugh at this post...maybe even as soon as next week.

So follow up to my question, if the above is not possible, should I just allocate the remaining 200 GB or so in my RAID1 drives that have the hypervisor isntalled, and make that for the VM files?  Then I could just add one more drive for data?  I could theoritically make a Windows 8 as a VM and make sure that autostarts, than people can just RDP to it, or install the management tools onto their local pc (I do understand that part of it).

When I was reading the supported Host OS list, it appeared it was compatible with basically all versions of Windows, and that's why I thought I could install Windows 8 and than install the VSphere software on it...

And as I keep reading it seems like it's common to install vSphere Hypervisor onto a Flash Drive/SD Card, and than possibly isolate the Virtual Machine files on one set of Drives and data on another.  Is that correct?  Trying to figure this stuff out.

Welcome to the Community,

ESXi is not an application which which gets installed on another OS. It is a bare metal Hypervisor, i.e. the operating system which is installed natively on the hardware. ESXi itself only requires ~1GB for the OS and another ~4GB for a scratch partition/location to store e.g. log files. The remaining disk space is used as a datastore on which you create the virtual machines. Rather than accessing disk space natively, create the virtual machines with virtual disks located on the datastore(s). To access the VM's - in addition to the ESXi tools, e.g. the vSphere Client - you can use any utility (like RDP) that you would also use to access the same OS on a physical systems.

André

Andre, thank you for the response.  So it's common practice to put any VM's using the remaining space on the drives I have the Hypervisor and OS installed on?  It makes sense, I just had a different vision going in, which is fine. 

Yes, ESXi will format/partition the installation disk automatically and create a VMFS datastore. If you do have additional disks in the system, you need to create the VMFS datastores on them manually. It's a best practice to keep ~15-20% free disk space in order to avoid out of disk space issues in case  of using snapshots, ...

André

Makes sense, I appreciate the responses.  I will work at this tomorrow and set up the second VMFS datastore.  Once I get it up and running I really should take notes so I don't forget for the next setup... thanks for the help.

The second option is more feasible. Install the ESXi on the first drive and it will format the remaining drive for virtual machine files. You can deploy the Windows 8 as a VM. Yeah you will laugh looking at your first post :)