VMWare ESX

[mosprovider]

I have wanted to learn VMWare ESX for a while and would like to attempt installing this at home. I found a version online 3.5 i believe and I have been doing some reading on it find out that it does not load on just any hardware.

I found post mentioning that I should load VMware workstation and running it through that however I had a former colleague who ran this from him home without using VMWare workstation.

Anyone manage to install this at home or know some tricks to get this to run?

Running this in VMWare workstation doesn't really seem like the point of what it would provide for me. I have multiple OS's I use for Training and I couldn't imagine having them all run with in VM Ware workstation under ESX but maybe that's what needs to be done...

Thanks in advance...

 

[dinkumthinkum]

ESX is a hypervisor, which is supposed to be like a tiny layer on top of the bare hardware that provides virtual machines and a few primitive OS-like services.

I believe ESX requires virtualization support in hardware, which is fairly common nowadays, but not universal.

Workstation is a more traditional product meant to run under an existing OS that can use hardware virtualization but also does the old software-only tricks that Intel-compatible processors used to require because they were never designed properly to begin with (and still aren't, thanks to the need for backwards compatibility).

If you are just using it for training under different OSes then VMWare Workstation (or just VMWare Player, which is free) would be what you want.

I am not a VMWare person (though I do work with a couple of such people) and so I can also recommend other (free) emulators such as QEMU/KVM, VirtualBox, and Bochs for your emulation needs

 

[mosprovider]

I have a tower that has 8g ram and a Pent quad core processor which should work fine for this project. I am just checking in to the likely hood of having an issue before wiping the box.

I have used VMware workstation quite a bit now and feel i know it pretty well. However on alot of jobs that cross my desk require ESX experience and Id like to set this up some how at home.

Im kinda getting that this maybe hard to do....

 

[DnetMHZ]

You can check your hardware against the VMWare compatibility guide

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

Your problem areas will most likely be SATA drives (if you have them) and NICs

 

[bobdole369]

Yup in short ESXi is the "rack" into which virtual "blades" are inserted.

You have a number of virtual machines that are running within a single physical machine.

Often something like this forms the basis for VPS.

Given fat enough hardware that is redundant in all aspects and licenses (if you go the MS way) you can build up several redundant servers virtually and stop and start them at will. Since the hypervisor is at a lower level than the OS, one could crash and not take down the rest of the machines.

 

[classy]

http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/esx40_whitebox_HCL.php

http://ultimatewhitebox.com/systems

If you check these two links you'll be able to see if your config will work. Up front I can tell you, I have used ESX and ESXi for about two years now, the storage controller and NIC are most important for compatability. You can't run 64 bit VMs without virtualization hardware support. Not all Intel quads have VT support. All AMD64 and higher cpus have virtualization support.

 

[bwanaaa]

forgive my stupidity, i only use vmware player (fusion to xp on a mac). What does esx and esxi do for you? If i want to run multiple oses, i can do that already.

and also, to the OP, is that avatar unique to you? I know a guy on planetgamer that uses the same. are you and he the same?

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I have a tower that has 8g ram and a Pent quad core processor which should work fine for this project. I am just checking in to the likely hood of having an issue before wiping the box.

I have used VMware workstation quite a bit now and feel i know it pretty well. However on alot of jobs that cross my desk require ESX experience and Id like to set this up some how at home.

Im kinda getting that this maybe hard to do....

Check your hardware against VMWare's compatibility list. Also, if you're worried about wiping your system, buy another drive and load VMWare on that to make sure you can get it working first before wiping anything.

ESXi is available free on their site and it is a lite hypervisor. IIRC, the limitation of the free ESXi is that it cannot be managed in Virtual Center. VC is where a lot of the magic happens but for a home environment, you probably wouldn't have the hardware or money to set up a VMWare cluster and manage it with VC.

I run two systems at home with the free VMWare Server running on a Windows OS. The performance isn't anything close to an ESX/ESXi cluster with a SAN, but for my purposes, it is fine. You might want to start with VMWare Server 2.0 and learn the basics of virtualization first, as that would translate over to ESXi. If you do manage to get ESXi working on your machine, you would gain exposure to the VI Client, as that is also used to manage clusters with VC.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

forgive my stupidity, i only use vmware player (fusion to xp on a mac). What does esx and esxi do for you? If i want to run multiple oses, i can do that already.

ESX and ESXi are industrial-strength virtualization products that are bare metal hypervisors. Because they don't run on top of an underlying OS, they are able to achieve excellent performance.

There are many other features and capabilities that these products have as well, but they're primarily geared towards the enterprise so you generally wouldn't be able to take advantage of them at home.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Yup in short ESXi is the "rack" into which virtual "blades" are inserted.

You have a number of virtual machines that are running within a single physical machine.

Often something like this forms the basis for VPS.

Given fat enough hardware that is redundant in all aspects and licenses (if you go the MS way) you can build up several redundant servers virtually and stop and start them at will. Since the hypervisor is at a lower level than the OS, one could crash and not take down the rest of the machines.

And if you cluster VMWare servers with a SAN and use DRS and HA, you can literally take a sledge hammer and destroy a single host and all of the VMs on that host will migrate over to another, live host (assuming you've planned your resources carefully) within a couple of seconds. It is extremely slick.

 

[bobdole369]

And if you cluster VMWare servers with a SAN and use DRS and HA, you can literally take a sledge hammer and destroy a single host and all of the VMs on that host will migrate over to another, live host (assuming you've planned your resources carefully) within a couple of seconds. It is extremely slick.

Niiiiiiice. I wish I had IT funds for something like that. I'm trying to justify using virtualization in a vessel monitoring system. The redundancy requirement is where I'm losing. It's more cost effective to run another PC, despite the many points of failure, however the industry hasn't opened its eyes. The marine world thinks 2 shitty PC's are better than 1 good PC with double parts.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Niiiiiiice. I wish I had IT funds for something like that. I'm trying to justify using virtualization in a vessel monitoring system. The redundancy requirement is where I'm losing. It's more cost effective to run another PC, despite the many points of failure, however the industry hasn't opened its eyes. The marine world thinks 2 shitty PC's are better than 1 good PC with double parts.

I flipped the switch on one of our hosts once, and most of the VMs were only down for a couple of pings. Of course, when they come up on the other host, they're in a crash consistent state, but even still, that beats being down for several minutes.

 

[JD50]

Niiiiiiice. I wish I had IT funds for something like that. I'm trying to justify using virtualization in a vessel monitoring system. The redundancy requirement is where I'm losing. It's more cost effective to run another PC, despite the many points of failure, however the industry hasn't opened its eyes. The marine world thinks 2 shitty PC's are better than 1 good PC with double parts.

You should look into RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization), it's a good bit cheaper than vmware.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

FWIW ESXi (the free one) has changed it's name to VMware vSphere Hypervisor

I was confused as hell trying to find some updates to our ESXi system.

It really is impressive stuff. We've consolidated servers down to just 2 boxes from what have been 5.

It really is a no-brainer on setting it up. Granted these are on Dell servers and not a workstation, but you just throw the CD in, boot, give the server an IP address and a few minutes later you are ready.

Just fire up the vsphere client and log into the server. Listing on the left of what servers you have and just right click and choose power on and it is literally like sitting in front of a server. Exact same boot procedures and everything.