Running ESX as VM ?

[mrudloff]

One thing I am missing is the possibility to run an ESX as virtual server ... simply to show the whole installation process in a classroom on a projector.

Did someone try to install ESX on Fusion ? I currently don't have my CDs here otherwise I would have tried that already. Unfortunately it does not work on other Windows based VMWare versions or even Microsoft products.

[MayurPatel]

I fully take your point on board, I was just suggesting if I could find out how I could get my hands on the VI3i preview USB stick. I was under the impression since these were handed out freely to anyone who asked for one at VMworld it would not impose any licence violiations etc after all I was only interested in playing with it. I was in touch with my VM contacts and they said they had run out of them and that was months ago and never heard back from them and to be honest I have not chased them up.

[13erla]

well with this in mind has anyone gotten regular esx 3 running in fusion with vms running as well?

i just want to play with iscsi and drs.. yes i realize this isn't a true test environment. but it's certainly something to allow for playing and fun

[MayurPatel]

Yes it is perfectly possible to run a VM or two within a ESX VI3 server running as a VM in Fusion. Just make sure your MAC is the Intel version and must have a Duo2Core CPU.

I have 2 ESX VI3 servers running as VM's which each host 2 Win2K3 Server VM's each. In order for the ESX servers to run within a VM it requires the following custom vmx settings added after the creation of the VM settings and the virtual nics should be configured also in the vmx files as e1000.

monitor_control.vt32 = TRUE

monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = TRUE

I have another VM running as a Netfiler appliance VM which has iscsi and together I have setup VMotion, DRS and HA and it all works perfectly as a play lab, don't expect high performance, things do run slowly so you have to be patient. In mine I have only have 2GBs of RAM, I am going to be adding more RAM in the hope it will improve the overall performance because I have had to limit the ESX to 750Mb and 1GB RAM each and the VM's to 256Mb each.

Give it a go and you will be pleasantly surprised.

[dmullen]

Hey folks,

I'm still suffering from the Memory Assertion failure as listed above. Here's my setup:

OSX 10.5.1

VMware Fusion 1.1

ESX 3.5 (64607) (Config Lines added: monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = TRUE & monitor_control.vt32 = TRUE)

Immediately fails when I attempt to power on the one Windows VM I created under the ESX Server.

I'm wondering if we have a version issue here that's causing the freakout...

-DaveM

[MayurPatel]

Hi Dave,

Just to let you know it is not an issue with Fusion/Leopard in the case of running a VM inside a virtualised ESX3.5 virtual machine. The same problem is also encountered in the Windows Workstation 6. You will be able to successfully start up a ESX3.5 VM but it is not currently possible to start a VM like it was possible to do in ESX3.0.x versions.

Just to eliminate this to be a Workstation/Fusion or Windows/Mac OSX problem I had tried it on both my Windows and Macbook pro machines and both ddisplayed the same behaviour.

Tom Howarth's post mentions about how ESX3.5 may be different in the way it sends the processes to the vCPU details can be found in the below post. It could also be due to the fact ESX 3.5 now supports VIM (paravirtualization)

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/121708?tstart=0&start=10

Hope this will help in you not spending additional time troubleshooting a problem which there doesn't appear to be a user configurable fix unless VMware takes heed of our comments and publishes a workaround or releases a fix as this will impact our ability to use Workstation/Fusion to create a mini lab for keeping upto date with the ESX functions and for quickly testing a configuration which would not be easily done in a production system.

MP