In VMware Workstation 6.5 beta 1, it is no longer possible to run ESX in a VM. This is because of some improvements that have been made in the code that unfortunately also prevents ESX from running in a VM.
I’ve been using this possibility in Workstation quite a lot for product testing and product demo’s and would love to get it back. I would even settle for less options in such a VM or for less performance. As long as its not gonna take an hour to start the VM, like it does without VT enabled.
See this thread: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/117676?tstart=0
If you would also like to be able to run ESX in Workstation, post into this thread to make VMware aware how often you use this functionality.
That is a shame for sure. Hopefully these same “improvements” don’t make it into VMware Fusion (on the Mac side) where I run VMware ESX for the same reasons you posted above. Nobody has any dreams of actually using a setup like this, but it is invaluable for demonstration purposes.
Count me in…great for small learning, studying for VCP, and demo!
Count me in…
Great feature…
this feature is a must for the virtualization world
Latest W6.5 (build 91182) brings back support for running ESX within a VM (no longer takes 2 hrs to boot)…
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/470-ESX-3.5-is-running-on-Workstation-6.5-Build-91182-!!!.html
The comments thing didn’t like that URL above, here is a link to the same page:
http://tinyurl.com/6rq6pu
Make sure to read the comments below the post for details on how to improve boot speed (debug folder) and powering on a VM within ESX (within a VM).
Have you tried virtualizing ESX host to Workstation?
I assume you are prevented from installing ESX on VM during installation process, but if you grab existing image from a physical host, would it work?
I haven’t tried, but i think you could be lucky.
yes, take it back! Or give me a cool ESX version to run on my laptop.