ESX on ESX is great for testing stuff

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Alastair

I’ve been playing with running ESXi as a guest on ESXi, mostly so I could test SRM v4.0 before teaching the 1.0 course.

As you may know ESX 4.0 can run another ESX 4.0 host as a VM.   The physical host uses hardware assisted virtualisation to run the 64bit virtual ESX server.  The virtual ESX server can only run 32bit VMs.  ESX on ESX is a great way to build a test lab, a single powerful host can run multiple test ESX servers. 

I took a look at Eric Gray’s VCritical post on the right VM setup to be the ESX virtual host, and ran each site of my SRM environment on one of the two HP Blades, I could have run them both on one blade if I’d had more storage in the blades. 

I would highly recommend ESX on ESX as a test lab, provided you can get a quad core machine with a heap of memory. 

I’m now looking for an inexpensive motherboard that can take 12GB (or more) of RAM, the I won’t need the blades to run my VDI and Windows 2008 domain, they can just run the testing environment.

© 2009, Alastair. All rights reserved.

About Alastair

I am a professional geek, working in IT Infrastructure. Mostly I help to communicate and educate around the use of current technology and the direction of future technologies.
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