Running VMware ESX 4 RC in a VMware 6.5.2 VM.

Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

I just set up another quick VI4 lab on my laptop for the purposes of capturing screen shots and testing some things out. I was worried because I was not able to start VMs in this lab using ESX 4 Beta 2, but everything is fine again! Here is a screen shot of a Winders 2003 VM running inside an ESX 4 RC VM which is running inside of Workstation 6.5.2 on an Ubuntu machine.

Click on the image for a full-size view.

My VMX settings were from a post on VMTN when I was trying to get ESX 3.0.x to run on a WS 6.0.  Actually, XTraVirt came up with the solution originally.

Well, my VMX has not changed MUCH since then. I only added some parameters for sharing SCSI disks so I don’t need an iSCSI server. I found THAT information on Duncan’s Blog.

##################################################
# Start DAC Customization

guestOS = “other-64”

monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = “true”
# monitor_control.virtual_exec = “hardware”
monitor.virtual_exec = “hardware”
monitor_control.vt32 = “true”

# REQUIRD FOR USING NTFS DRIVES WITH LINUX HOSTS
mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE

# For SCSI disk sharing
disk.locking = “FALSE”
diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = “0”
diskLib.dataCacheMaxReadAheadSize = “0”
diskLib.dataCacheMinReadAheadSize = “0”
diskLib.dataCachePageSize = “4096”
diskLib.maxUnsyncedWrites = “0”

bios.bootDelay = “5000”

ethernet0.present = “TRUE”
ethernet0.connectionType = “custom”
ethernet0.wakeOnPcktRcv = “FALSE”
ethernet0.vnet = “/dev/vmnet3”
ethernet0.virtualdev = “e1000”
ethernet1.present = “TRUE”
ethernet1.connectionType = “custom”
ethernet1.vnet = “/dev/vmnet3”
ethernet1.virtualDev = “e1000”
ethernet1.wakeOnPcktRcv = “FALSE”
ethernet2.present = “TRUE”
ethernet2.connectionType = “custom”
ethernet2.vnet = “/dev/vmnet3”
ethernet2.virtualDev = “e1000”
ethernet2.wakeOnPcktRcv = “FALSE”
ethernet3.present = “TRUE”
ethernet3.connectionType = “custom”
ethernet3.vnet = “/dev/vmnet3”
ethernet3.virtualDev = “e1000”
ethernet3.wakeOnPcktRcv = “FALSE”
ethernet4.present = “TRUE”
ethernet4.connectionType = “custom”
ethernet4.vnet = “/dev/vmnet3”
ethernet4.virtualDev = “e1000”
ethernet4.wakeOnPcktRcv = “FALSE”
ethernet5.present = “TRUE”
ethernet5.connectionType = “custom”
ethernet5.vnet = “/dev/vmnet3”
ethernet5.virtualDev = “e1000”
ethernet5.wakeOnPcktRcv = “FALSE”

ethernet0.addressType = “generated”
ethernet1.addressType = “generated”
ethernet2.addressType = “generated”
ethernet3.addressType = “generated”
ethernet4.addressType = “generated”
ethernet5.addressType = “generated”
# End DAC Customization
#####################################################

My next posts will involve installing ESX 4 in text mode and some very interesting findings during that install….