As I expected, Xtravirt released a whitepaper about “How to install ESX 4.0 on Workstation 6.5.2 as a VM“. In the PDF you’ll find how-to configure your ESX VM so that you can run nested VM’s. (VMs inside of the ESX 4.0 VM).
That’s a great news, because I use to have ESX 3.0 and ESX 3.5 installed in a VM’s on my laptop inside of VMware Workstation. You can do a lot of thinks on your laptop this way. You can configure several ESX Servers and in another VM you can install vCenter and play arround with your ESX cluster this way.
As some of you noticed, when you install vSphere(ESX) within a VM you will need at least 2GB to get the installer started. Even when it has finished installing you can’t reduce the memory because the following error will occur:
I couldn’t find a way of pre-adjusting the memory requirements but there’s a way to change this behavior and to downsize the memory when the installation has finished. Keep in mind this is, as far as I know, not supported… it’s only to be used to run ESX within VMware Workstation for your demo / test environment. I personally use it for running 2 ESX servers and vCenter within VMware Workstation on my 4GB laptop. (That’s what I actually use to create screenshots and prepare blog articles.)
ESX:
- Install vSphere(ESX) with at least 2 GB memory
- Login to the Service Console and type the following:
vi /etc/vmware/init/init.d/00.vmnix
- Change the following line to the desired value:
RequiredMemory=2064384
- Shutdown the virtual machine and change the VMs memory and boot it up!
Thanks Mark for the comment on ESXi:
- Install vSphere(ESXi) with at least 2 GB memory
- Login to the console via the “unsupported” method.
- Edit the file /etc/vmware/esx.conf and add the following line:
/vmkernel/minMemoryCheck = “false”
- Save the file and shutdown ESXi, change the memory and boot it up!
Don’t use any other editor than “vi”, there are multiple reports of nano wrecking the layout of the file which leads to an unrecoverable error during booting.
This section of TechHead is dedicated to providing a list of useful VMware ESX related tools and utilities. This list will grow over time and please feel free to let me know of any tools/utils that you feel should be on the list.
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