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rb1970
Contributor
Contributor

Can I nest 5.1 inside 4.1 esxi?

I kinda screwed the pooch yesterday and haphazardly upgraded my lab machine (that has 48GB RAM) from ESXi 4.1 to ESXi 5.1.

The upgrade went fine, but I hadn't picked up on the 32GB RAM limitation in 5.1, and now I can't apply a license and am in 60 day countdown mode.

Is it possible to downgrade the hypervisor back to 4.1 (yes, I realize I will probably have to do clean install) and then run a couple of nested 5.1 hypervisors under 4.1 so that I can still use all my 48GB of RAM?

I've never tried nesting before so need to read up on it first, but thought I would first see if it's worth the hassle.

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Given some differences in the bootloader you won't be able to roll back to 4.1 without a reinstall - http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=200450....

You should be fine to run a nested 5.1 VM, but any VMs run on 5.1 would be limited to 32 bit OSes.   You need ESXi 5.x running on the physical hardware to get 64 bit guests running on your nested ESXi instances.

rb1970
Contributor
Contributor

Oh wow, the 32bit thing is a deal breaker.

I guess i'll have to keep my VMs under 4.1 for a while.

I still might do a nested 5.1 just to play with it, but without 64bits not much good for my uses.

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