And so this started today with a Twitter post. If you know it or not I am a big enthusiast of trying to install ESX on all kinds of hardware - especially Whiteboxes that are not on the HCL. I have tested it on a number of HP, Dell and IBM desktops. The great thing about this is - it mostly works, it is completely not supported, but a lot of fun to do. But to lug around with a desktop to present demos, is not always the most convenient thing in the world - to put it mildly.
What-if (or as you would say it in Powershell -whatif) you could create a system, that has a full demonstration environment of multiple VM's - and all of this on your LAPTOP!
So I looked around on the Web and found a few mentions of people who have done this. What kind of problems they ran into and what was possible or not. The consensus is to Install a Base OS, Workstation on top of that, ESX as a VM, and then VM's onto that ESX VM. The consensus about this as well was "IT IS AS SLOW AS A TORTISE!". ESX on bare metal should be much much faster,
So my adventure started with this:
- Lenovo T400 Laptop 267812G - Intel Core2 Duo T9400 2.53GHz with 2GB RAM
- ESX4i build 171294
The laptop:
Started out in the BIOS, enabled Intel VT
SATA was set as AHCI
And off we go
Install Screen
Recognizes the Disk
And 4 minutes later
All hardware detected out of the box - Network card included
Next was to connect to the laptop with the VI client.
Now all I have to do is find out why I cannot power on a machine. Every time I started a VM the laptop froze - completely! Hard reboot and the machine came back up OK but the VM was no longer registered.
Have to look into that further
Hope you enjoyed the ride.