Running ESXi 5 on ESXi 4.1? Yes you can!
If you are wondering if you can run your vSphere 5 lab nested on ESXi 4.1, the answer is yes.
I used Eric Gray’s (@eric_gray) procedure VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself to create the VMs. For the guest OS type I tried Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (64-bit) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (64-bit) and both worked without a glitch.
Here they are running on top of my whitebox, which is running ESXi 4.1 Update 1, the left one (esxi5) is created as RHEL6 and the right one (esxi5-02) RHEL5.
I added also the monitor_control.restrict_backdoor option but have not try yet to run nested VMs. I’ll do later and will update the post with the results.
Juanma
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Categories: Virtualization, VMware
ESXi, ESXi4, ESXi5, homelab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere
Great Juanma… so… can you try to run a RHEL over esxi5*?… and :) can you try to load de KVM module?
Thank you very much for your appointment.
ESXi is running nested on my physical 4.1U1 host. To do what you want ESXi5 must be running on ESXi 5 too. I’ll try it in the next few weeks as soon as I update the host to ESXi5.
Theoretically you can do it, check Eric Gray’s post http://www.vcritical.com/2011/07/vmware-vsphere-can-virtualize-itself/ where he shows a Hyper-V guest running a CentOS VM so the same procedure should work also for RHEV.