• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

any serious drawbacks in running nested ESXi for labs?

T

Thuleman

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 13, 2004
Messages
5,833
Let's say I need 20 ESXi hosts, or 40 or whatever, to run a lab on, is there any reason why I couldn't pack a bunch of ESXi installed onto one physical machine and have at it?

There are a number of articles online explaining how to set that up. The actual question is whether there is any issue with doing so for a classroom instruction type of setting.
 
vSphere 5.x is much more forgiving when it comes to this as you now have the ability to run nested 64bit guests.

I use it in my Lab and it works very well. I have yet to run into really, any limitation. I run 3 physical hosts, one is extremely beefy and runs 4 nested ESXi 5 hosts, 2 for my vCloud Director deployment, and 2 for my View deployment and they work extremely well..

Follow these guidelines and you should be fine:

1. Can't present VMXNET3 adapters to the nested ESXi hosts, you should present the e1000 adapters.
2. Make sure you edit the /etc/vmware/config file and add the entry: vhv.allow = "TRUE"
3. When creating the nested esxi vm, choose Red Hat Linux 6, after you create the vm and change the config file, change the VM Guest Operating system to VMware ESXi 5.x
4. Change the port groups that you are running the nested ESXi VM's on to Promiscuous.

Great blogs here that shows you how to enable EVC and links to some of what I pointed out above in the article.

http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/02/how-to-configure-nested-esxi-5-to.html
http://vinf.net/vtardis/
 
Yo dawg, we heard you like VMs, so we put a hypervisor in your hypervisor so you can virtualize while you virtualize
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top