Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

I’ve not tried this before but it seems to work, my config is as follows – note this is a home/test system so I don’t suppose this is supported for a production platform

• Single ESX 3.5 host
• 1 x Windows 2003 VM with Virtual Center 2.5, licence manager, update manager and convertor plug ins, SQL Express database for VC (not supported for production)
• VM is connected to the same IP network as the ESX service console.

Because I was short on hardware I built the 1st Virtual Centre server as a VM on my laptop with VM Workstation 6 as a linked clone from my standard VM server image.

Once everything is up and running I used VM Convertor from Virtual Centre to do a P2V migration of itself over the network (weird!) into ESX – technically a V2V 😉

I then powered up the VC VM on the ESX box and changed it’s IP address to avoid conflicts.

Then shut down and killed the VC VM on my workstation.

It worked – I can connect to the virtual VC box and use it as before.

I also installed the VI client directly on my laptop so I could manage the virtual VC box over the network without RDP’ing into it.

I set the VC VM to auto-start with the ESX host and physically rebooted the ESX box to make sure – and it all rebooted fine and both the ESX and VC VM started up, I believe the ESX host caches licence data in case of a short-term VC server failure – this seems to get around the issue of not being able to power on a VM without a licence and seems to work ok for me.