Question about a small system

[res2681]

Hello,

I apologize for my ignorance, I am new to virtualization and may have need for it in a special case I will describe below.

I have an XP rackmount computer with either a i5 or i7 processor and it runs proprietary software to communicate to proprietary hardware over ip.  There is a limitation with the proprietary hardware so I need two instances to talk to two "master" boards, they can't do two instances so I either have to buy two machines and have them KVM to a Monitor and mouse or I was thinking of putting ESXi on the machine and using the physical to virtual tool and now I would have two instances running on the same machine.  By default the current systems are not resource intensive so I do not see multiple instances being too much for the PC hardware.

So assuming the hardware is compatible (CPU, RAM, HD, etc.) can I put ESXi on the system and have a hosted virtualization system witha VM on the same system, would I need to buy any license, is this a bad idea?  Also can I download and test this for free?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - What you describe is very achievable - one correction is ESXi si installed on the bare metal so it will over write the existing installation of XP - if you want to maintain the XP installtion you might look at one of the hosted products like VMware Player or Workstation which will install ontop of the existing XP operatings system -

ESXi also will work as long as the hardware is supported you will be able to install ESXi on the pc and create two VMs with XP -