Archive for the ‘Virtualization’ Category

Install and Run VMware ESXi 4.1 From USB Thumb/Flash Drive

Friday, November 19th, 2010

2010-12-22 Updated

2010-11-19 Initial Post

This was a cool feature that came out in 4.0. Basically you just plug a USB flash drive into the computer, boot with the ESXi install CD and select to install ESXi on the USB flash drive. Aftewards, you can run ESXi from the USB flash drive. This allows you to use all your internal hard drives for storing VMs. (more…)

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

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

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.

Hyper-V – Configure The Host to Route Between Virtual Network Subnets

Sunday, October 17th, 2010

2011-01-13 Updated

2010-10-17 Initial Post

Windows Server 2008 R2, Enterprise

I decided to give this another shot today and try to figure out how to create multiple subnets/virtual networks so that I can set up a more realistic AD infrastructure with multiple sites/subnets. (more…)

Virtual PC 2004 / 2007 –> Start a Virtual PC 2004 / 2007 VM Via Batch File in Scheduled Tasks

Monday, February 8th, 2010

2010-02-08 Initial Post

If you're using Hyper-V, you don't need to do this because Hyper-V has settings in the GUI for VM startup and shutdown. This post is only for Virtual PC 2004 / 2007 (I haven't used Virtual Server 2005 so I can't comment on that). I still use Virtual PC 2007 because I have to keep my home host computer on Windows XP, otherwise I would switch to Hyper-V. (more…)

Is Your CPU / Processor Virtualization Compatible (For Hyper-V)?

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

2011-02-15 Updated

2008-10-15 Initial Post

Per this MS page on 2010-02-07, to run Hyper-V “a 64-bit system with hardware-assisted virtualization enabled and data execution prevention (DEP) is required.” (more…)