Le blog d’Étienne Pouliot , consultant en systèmes informatiques

By now, most of the people know that you can use VMware Workstation to virtualize ESX or ESXi.  By doing that, you have an easy way to test or experiment ESX.

But I was wondering, would it be possible to run multiple ESXi within VMware Workstation and VMotion virtual machine from a virtualised ESXi to another virtualised ESXi ?  The answer is yes.  Here how I did it.

But why would want to do that ?  In my case for fun and also to experiment with vSphere.

I did that with my 2 laptops. Here are my systems :

VMware Workstation running both ESXi and the NFS server for the shared datastore:

• Model : Dell inspiron 1525
• Operating system : OpenSuse 11.1
• Memory : 3GB
• CPU : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T7250  @ 2.00GHz

Vcenter server and vSphere client:

• Model : IBM T42
• Operating system : Windows XP
• Memory : 1 GB
• CPU :  Intel Pentium M 1.6 GHz

I insalled 2 ESXi in my VMware Workstation.  To do that, you simply need to create a virtual machine as a Red Hat Linux 64 bits and add the following lines in your .vmx file :

monitor_control.vmk_segments = true
monitor_control.vt32 = true
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = true
monitor.virtual_mmu = hardware
monitor.virtual_exec = hardware
vmx.allowNested = true

For the network adpaters of my ESXi, I simply configured them as a bridged interface.  You could choose pretty much what you want, as long as the virtual machine see each other and can see your datastore.

Next, I installed vCenter on my IBM laptop.  Some of you migth notice that my system does not meet the systems requirement for vCenter.  It still works.   I would recommend that you disable the « VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices » services to free an extra 256 MB of RAM.

I added a VMkernel network with the VMotion activated to the network interface on both my ESXi.

On my Linux machine, I created an NFS share that I added as a datastore on both my ESXi.

I installed a virtual machine (In my case a CentOS 5.3) in the NFS datastore.  I installed the VMware tools on that virtual machine.

Finally,  I tryed the VMotion and to my surprise it actually worked!  Even storage VMotion works! How cool is that!

Here are some screenshots :

vCenter and a completed VMotion:

Succesful VMotion

A succesful storage VMotion :

My VMware Workstation with 2 ESXi Virutal Machine :

An htop showing the ressources usage on my Linux.  Notice that even with 2 ESXi virtual machine,  my system is still only using about 1GB of RAM :

Hope you like it and have fun with your vSphere lab!