Install VMware ESXi 4.1 (VMware vSphere Hypervisor) on Hyper-V VM (I Tried And Didn’t Get It To Work)

2010-11-15 Initial Post

I tried to install VMware ESXi 4.1 (VMware vSphere Hypervisor) inside a VM on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and the install won't complete. I wasn't sure if it would work, but I thought I'd give it a shot. Why did I want to do this?

1.) I have a Dell desktop that ESXi will not install on directly. Apparently it has something to do with the SATA drives.
2.) I don't want to pay for VMWare Workstation, which is supposed to be able to host ESXi servers as guests.

The ESXi install gets stuck at this line: Booting: MBI=0x000100a8, entry=0x0040024a.

From what I've read, ESXi cannot install on IDE drives. Hyper-V does have SCSI virtual hard disk drives, but it doesn't allow a SCSI drive to be the boot/system drive. This is the notification in the Hyper-V Manager : Do not attach a system disk to a SCSI controller. A virtual hard disk that contains an operating system must be attached to an IDE controller.

Regardless of that message, I still tried to install ESXi on a SCSI VHD and it got stuck at the same line.

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