ESXi 6.5 on KVM

ESXi on KVM with Nested support.

Installing ESXi on KVM is fairly easy task. Maybe because it belongs there? :)
There are only few important things that have to be done right, rest is next next deploy.

In this article we used ESXi 6.5 image. At the time of writing that is the latest and greatest ESXi version available. It comes with the WebClient naturally.
In fact the WebClient has been officially around since 6.2 (optionally available since 5.5 & 6.0).
Let me tell you however, it is still full of bugs.
I am a Linux user, hence I couldn't test IE (all MS must die! :) but having a go with Epiphany, Firefox and Chromium  can confirm that Firefox works better than the rest most of the time. Chrome/Chromium often gets into "unexpected error - reload?" which most of the time cannot be even solved bu thrashing cache and history but requires more extreme measures such as deleting preferences or even reinstalling the browser.

It is a lame provided the vmware corporate caliber and available funds and resources.
I cannot sop but wonder what could happen if the oVirt community could gets access to VMWare resources and $ for only a year.... but thats a story for another day.

Nonetheless, we are here to demo ESXi under KVM so lets get down to business.

KVM VM HARDWARE

This bit is important to get right otherwise ESXi would not install.
We will start configure option is presented in virt-manager in a top-down order.

CPU
Here it is important to pass-through the physical CPU virtualisation capabilities onto ESXi instead of emulating certain CPU family on a KVM level.

  
MEMORY:
In this scenario we allocated 12GB of RAM to ESXi
 
BOOT OPTIONS:
Select the CDROM as a primary boot option where later we mount the ISO file.

HARDDISK
Important. Make sure the Disk bus: IDE is selected so ESXi can recognise the virtual HDD. 
 
INSTALL ISO
Here we mount the install ISO image for ESXi

 
NIC
Important. Make sure you select the old good E1000 driver. ESXi cannot recognise VirtIO drivers
 
DISPLAY
Select VNC as the default display driver to save yourself a trouble and suffering
 
BOOT AND INSTALL
Simple start the VM now, the CD should be selected as the first boot option and ESXi will start installing
 

NESTED SUPPORT

Although before we configured the ESXi VM with host-passthrough CPU ESXi requires few more manual settings to complete the nested support and use all the physical CPU available virtualisation features.

Once the EXSi is installed

Login the the WebClient

Enable the ssh service

Login via ssh

Add the last two lines in /etc/vmware/config as indicated below
Copy the lines from here:
hv.assumeEnabled = “TRUE”
vmx.allowNested = “TRUE”


Final step is to reboot the server so it can obtain the new settings configured in /etc/vmware/config

Ready to rock and start installing Virtual Machines on your Nested ESXi server.
Sounds crazy cool!



Drop me a comment below if any questions or suggestions.
See ya!

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