VMware: VMTN Blog: You got your ESX in my Workstation!

Long ago in January, richard6121 started a thread in the VMware Forums suggestion box entitled Ability to run ESX as a Workstation guest. VMware's own Petr confirmed that with just the right knob twiddling and the right chip, you could convince Workstation 6.0 to run ESX Server inside of it. The race was on and the next few months were filled with through-the-looking-glass moments (yes, it even works on Fusion) and probably a bit of actual work as well -- you probably wouldn't want to run your production servers on it, but it's great for training, configuring, demos, and experimentation.

In June, the gentlemen behind the always-excellent xtravirt.com unveiled their own whitepaper in this thread.

Now they've just released their follow-on paper in this thread:

I've written a follow up white paper to the Xtravirt "ESX3 on Workstation 6" white paper, outlining the steps to install an iSCSI Enterprise Target Server in a VM and configure your ESX3 VMs to use this iSCSI storage for a 'VI3 in a box' configuration.

Great if you want to demo VI3 Enterprise features like VMotion, HA and DRS without having demo server kit available - you can run all of the required compenents on a single physical machine. This will also run on well specced laptop for mobile demonstrations.

Enjoy.

Comments

This has been immeasurably helpful in our creating and tweaking automated network ESX deployment process. having to work with only physical systems in tweaking process improvements and developing new solutions was driving me batty. Long live virtualization for testing!

Posted by: Kent A | July 26, 2007 at 06:01 AM

Nice but I prefer Freenas which is available as VMWare appliance. It does support iSCSI but I have it running as a NFS server. Needs only 20MB of harddisk space and 128MB memory.

Posted by: Marcel | July 26, 2007 at 06:14 AM