ESXi on Xen?

McTurkey

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 8, 2011
Messages
244
I know that with ESXi 5 you can run nested virtualization, but I'm curious if it is possible to get ESXi working as a VM inside Xen. Googling it has thus far only yielded results related to running Xen as a VM on ESXi. Has anyone actually done this?
 
I was going to try and get Xen running as an ESXi vm to test out. Hopefully Ill have a chance in the next few days.
 
May i ask why you would want to do this?? if its testing dual boot or grab a new HDD for testing.
 
esxi has ability to run other virtualization. So theoretically its possible. But why xen?
 
Xen is free, with no ram/cpu limits. ESXi is decidedly limited. For a lab, being able to play around with multiple ESXi hosts is useful, but expensive if you have to throw a lot of separate hardware at it. With the 32GB limit on ESXi 5 free, it would be tough to get more than one or two hosts running for this on the same physical machine.

I've got the parts on the way for a dedicated ESXi box, as well as the parts to upgrade my existing server, which will be moved over to Xen. I guess I will just have to try getting some ESXi VMs setup on the Xen box once I have it all up and running. I definitely considered picking up a license and just building a monster machine, but had a hard time justifying the $560 outlay for that before even looking at hardware.
 
Xen is free, with no ram/cpu limits. ESXi is decidedly limited. For a lab, being able to play around with multiple ESXi hosts is useful, but expensive if you have to throw a lot of separate hardware at it. With the 32GB limit on ESXi 5 free, it would be tough to get more than one or two hosts running for this on the same physical machine.

you can have as many hosts as you would like to.. I am not understanding two hosts on physical machine part. Thats kind imposible if your saying at the same time.
 
Just curious... what are you doing that you need more than 32GB vRAM on one ESX Host?
 
you can have as many hosts as you would like to.. I am not understanding two hosts on physical machine part. Thats kind imposible if your saying at the same time.

You have your main baremetal host, which can have several guest VMs of ESXi running as their own "hosts" with their own guest VMs. This seems to be the easiest/cheapest way to setup a lab to test vmotion/failover/etc during the evaluation period. For my main/storage server, I'll be running some VMs that need to remain up for the house network, so I can't be taking it offline to do this.
 
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