Comments on: Installing ESX 4.0 on VMware Fusion

By: Marco Castro

Marco Castro — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 17:18:20 +0000

Hey guys, great article.

When Im installing, I run accross this error.

0:00:00:30:175 cpu0:4945)Warning: Syslog not configured…

Any ideas?

Thank you.
MC

By: BinaryPoet

BinaryPoet — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 05:44:41 +0000

One nice hack that i figured out to get around having to have a disk already preallocated is this trick. I used vmware workstation to configure the attributes of the vm (os, nics, disk, iso, etc.) For the hard drive I chose the largest size 950gb but not preallocated. Then I started a windows xp installation to create a partition for that drive. Of course you could do fdisk but I didn’t have those utils handy at the time. After it created the partition I followed your steps and my esx instance thinks that there is 950gb available to it. Nice for moving it around from smaller to bigger servers with more resources.

By: tim smy

tim smy — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:07:53 +0000

you should try it on fusion 3.1.0
its the best

By: Virtualization Cascading « Nabrantes's Blog

Virtualization Cascading « Nabrantes's Blog — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 22:43:34 +0000

[...] http://www.van-lieshout.com/2009/06/installing-esx-40-on-vmware-fusion/ [...]

By: Arnim van Lieshout

Arnim van Lieshout — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:54:11 +0000

To be honest, I don’t use ESX inside Fusion a lot, because I’m lucky to have a testlab for ESX stuff. In my experience the vSphere client is quite cpu and memory intensive, so maybe you’re running out of memory. You could try to increase the memory on your WinXP vm. I calculate 1GB extra for just vSphere client, so I would increase it to 1.5GB. Unfortunately you’re limited to 4GB overall memory on your MacBook, which doesn’t give you much flexibility.
Another thing I noticed in your configuration is that the ESX vm has only 1 CPU while mimimum requirements are 2 CPU. Try increasing that as wel.

Hope this helps.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:30:20 +0000

Hi Arnim,

Thank you, this was exactly what I was looking for. And yes VMware and Apple rock!

I do experience some very slow performance (both vm consuming lots of host CPU when both are running, in particular the WinXP vm, which goes wild as soon as vSphere client is active) and have no explanation yet (in order to fix it or live with it). Somehow I feel that Fusion is having difficulties managing the simultaneous workloads of the 2 VMs. Do you have similar experiences? Could you comment on that?

This is my current setup:

Host: MacBook 13 (late 2008) with 2.0 Ghz P7380 Core 2 Duo (P7350, has Intel VT) and 4 GB RAM
OS X 10.5.8 with Fusion 2.0.5 (build 173382), performance preference for vm disk performance

VM1 : 1 CPU, 1024 MB, 40 GB (split disk) Bridged Network, Win XP Pro to run vSphere Client v4.0
VM2 : 1 CPU, 2048 MB, 10GB pre-allocated disk, Bridged Network, ESXi 4.0 (build 208167)

Thanks,
Peter

By: Support your favourite blog. Vote Now! | Arnim van Lieshout

Support your favourite blog. Vote Now! | Arnim van Lieshout — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:40:07 +0000

[...] Installing ESX 4.0 on VMware Fusion [...]

By: Arnim van Lieshout

Arnim van Lieshout — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:17:52 +0000

Hi Prasanth,

To setup 2 ESX4 servers on Fusion just use the same procedure to install an additional ESX4 server. To connect the machines to the vcenter server depends on several things.
Make sure that all 3 vms are on the same network and have a unique ip-address.

So if your vcenter server is NOT running on your Mac, make sure that the network settings of both ESX vms is set to Bridged. (You cannot use NAT in this setup, because both vms will share the same external ip-address with this setting).
If set to bridged, the vms are connected to the same network as your Mac, so setup ip-addresses accordingly. After this is done, check connectivity between vcenter and vm (I use Ping) and connect your ESX servers to your vcenter server.

If your vcenter server runs on your Mac too, you can choose any vm network setting you like, as long as you choose the SAME setting on all 3 vms. Which setting to choose depends on if you want a connection to your external network or not. I would prefer the Host-Only setting, to isolate the environment from the external network.
The ip-adresses to assign to your vms (in case you don’t want to use DHCP) depends on your networking setting again. Go into a terminal windows and issue the command “ifconfig”. Look for the ip info on network adapters vmnet1 (Host-Only) and vmnet8 (NAT) and configure an unique ip-address in the given network range on all of your vms. After this is done, check connectivity between vcenter and vm (I use Ping) and connect your ESX servers to your vcenter server.

Regarding your networking problem on your vcenter server running on WinXP, I suggest disabling the firewall on your WinXP guest.

-Arnim

By: Prasanth

Prasanth — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:33:36 +0000

Any ideas how to get 2 ESX 4.0 servers to run on Fusion and connect to the same vCenter server.

Also, with my setup, (running vCenter Server in XP Pro), it drops every minute because I can’t seem to open port 902. Any ideas?

By: Virtualisierung: ESXi ausprobieren auf dem Mac | PHP Gangsta - Der PHP Blog

Virtualisierung: ESXi ausprobieren auf dem Mac | PHP Gangsta - Der PHP Blog — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:08:35 +0000

[...] nicht vernünftig, da ein Hypervisor innerhalb eines Hypervisors nicht unterstützt wird. Doch Dank eines Blog-Artikels habe ich es dennoch ans Laufen bekommen, und nun kann ich ESXi ausgiebig [...]