Running ESX 3.5 and 3i Under VMWare Workstation 6.5 Beta Build 91182
May 18, 2008
Following on from my earlier post I upgraded my installation to the new build of 6.5. it un-installed the old build and re-installed the latest without a problem, took about 30mins and required a reboot of the host OS.
All my previously suspended XP/2003 VM’s resumed ok without a restart but needed an upgrade to the VMTools which did require a restart of the guest OS - all completed with no problems.
Now, onto installing ESX….
I used the settings from Eric’s post here to edit my .vmx file
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″
monitor.virtual_exec = “hardware”
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = “true”
Note - you need to select an x64 Linux version from the VM type drop down, if you have to go back and change it via the GUI after you’ve edited the .vmx file it overwrites the Ethernet card “e1000″ setting to “vlance” so you need to edit again otherwise the ESX installer won’t find a compatible NIC and won’t install.
it was initially very slow to boot; 5mins on my dual core laptop with only one error - which was expected..
To improve the performance I changed my installation to run the non-debug version of the Workstation binaries (rename the vmware-vmx.exe to vmware-vmx-debug.exe)
note: this isn’t recommended unless you know what you are doing, VMWare will rely on the output from the debug version of the code if you need to report any issues)
It also seems to work for the installable version of ESX 3i… (although I’ve not quite figured out the point of that version yet :)).
Install prompt
it did fail with an error the 1st time round..
this was because I had specified an IDE disk as per the ESX instructions, I changed it to a SCSI one and it worked ok.
Finished..
The ESX 3i install has a footprint of about 200Mb on disk, and ESX 3.5 uses 1.5Gb.
I’m going to keep the 3.5 install on my laptop and will try to use linked clones to maintain a couple of different versions/configs to save disk space.. I’m sure I could knock up a quick script to change the hostname/IP of each clone - if I do I’ll post it here.
Why would you want to do this? well because you can, of course 
and its handy for testing patch updates and scripts for ESX management etc.
I will also try to get a ESX DRS cluster running under workstation with a couple of ESX hosts and shared storage over iSCSI using something like OpenFiler as shown here. won’t exactly be production performance, but useful for testing and demo’ing.
Thanks for the info & screencaps~
can you explain how do you do this
To improve the performance I changed my installation to run the non-debug version of the Workstation binaries (rename the vmware-vmx.exe to vmware-vmx-debug.exe)
what do I need to do here to remove that debug things and run fast ?
Also I tried 91182, it is very very slow
Hi, has any one tried to install ESX 3.5 on a VM in ESX instead of Workstation?
http://vinf.net/2008/06/12/can-you-run-esx-as-a-vm-under-esx/
[...] yeah - but hey you’ve got to try it, prompted by a question from Prasad - can you run ESX in a VM under [...]
uddhav -
vmware.exe is a stub loader, it then calls
vmware-vmx.exe
or vmware-vmx-debug.exe
if you are running a beta build (like 6.5) when you run vmware.exe it will run vmware-vmx-debug.exe.
so, rename vmware-vmx-debug.exe to be vmware-vmx.exe and it should work.
That said, I know techhead (http://www.techhead.co.uk/)was having a similar problem today with the ESX under VM Workstation 6.5 image it not performing very well, even after forcing vmware to run non-debug, still not got to the bottom of that one, we even copied my image to his laptop - so maybe thats a hardware/performance problem?
worth noting that vmware do leave the debug settings on beta builds for a good reason, so they can gather information on problems… just bear that in mind, they put things out to beta for a good reason
[...] I’ve only just got round to implementing the recommendations from vinf.net after reading the blog post ages ago. Not being able to run ESX 3.5 in a VM was a big blow for me as I do a lot of test and [...]
I’m having difficulty getting a vm to run under esx under workstation - is this possible?
Did you build VMotion env?
VMotion time out in my env.
I’ve not tried this, would think it /could/ work but would be v.slow, which might explain the timeout you experience - I’ve only used this VM under a VM approach for testing scripted installs, testing things etc.
It’s cheap enough to build a physical lab using ESX which is usable for running VMs - http://vinf.net/2008/01/14/vmware-esx-v35-on-cheap-pc-hardware/