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LesykM
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Contributor
‎07-09-2013 11:27 PM
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ESXi inside KVM

Hello!

I wonder, if it is possible to run ESXi 5.0/5.1 inside KVM (proxmox) ?

I need to run few for testing purposes. I cannot setup any other virtualization software.

I need only ESXi itself, even without virtual machines inside it:)

Thanks!

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Hejdesgaard
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Contributor
‎09-26-2016 06:08 AM
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I just installed esxi6u2 on top of qemu-2.7.0, following https://allyourco.de/running-vmware-esxi-under-qemu-kvm/

I'm using virt-manager-1.3.2 for qemu management.

Now I tried to deploy the vcsa, it got pushed to the esxi host and then I got a PSOD with the error:"PCPU 0 locked up. Failed to ack TLB invalidate" I suspect it's an issue with about multiple sockets instead of one socket with multiple cores.

I have changed the cpu setting to current allocation: 2, topoligy: 1 socket, 2 cores, 1 thread. This seems to work.

Another issue I encountered is that esxi refuses to boot the vcsa appliance, complaining about: "you are running vmware esx through an incompatible hypervisor" and vmware KB 2108724 specifies that the vm's config has to be altered to add vmx.allowNested=TRUE for the nested VM to run.

If you have access to powercli, then you can set this new adv. setting the following way:

connectVIserver [ESXi host]

get-vm [vm name] | new-advancedsetting -name vmx.allowNested -value 'TRUE'

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