I’ve been studying pretty hard for my VMware VCP certification lately, and needed to learn more about DRS/HA etc. Without a few tweaks you cannot run ESX inside of Workstation, but here is how you can do it with Workstation 6. Note: you need to have an Intel VT capable chipset with it enabled in the BIOS.
Create a new VM and choose ‘Custom’, select ‘Workstation 5′ hardware compatibility and select the box for ESX Server Compatible. Select Linux as the guest operating system and leave it as Red Hat Linux. Use 2 processors. Set the SCSI Adapter to LSI Logic.
Once the VM is created, you need to add a few things into the .vmx file. Note: The line for ethernet0.present = "TRUE" may already exist
- ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
- ethernet0.connectionType = "bridged"
- ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
- ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
- monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = TRUE
- monitor_control.vt32 = "TRUE"
That’s it, now you should be able to install and use ESX server on Workstation 6, for storage check out FreeNAS or OpenFiler for iSCSI/NFS connectivity or for Windows take a look at Starwind.
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