Very Rookie Question

[sk8er88]

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.

[sk8er88]

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...

[sk8er88]

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.

[a_p_]

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

[sk8er88]

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. 

[a_p_]

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

[sk8er88]

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.

[admin]

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 🙂