ESX4 or ESX4i on HP dv8t laptop

[tolanid]

Hey guys,

For test purposes that I can take with me I am planning to install (first purchase the laptop) ESXi or ESXi on HP dv8t laptop with i7-720QM with 8 GB of RAM. This will not be a test environment. Does anyone have any experience doing this? Anything you can share will be appreciated??

My other option that was suggested to me was to run the Workstation and install the ESX/ESXi as VMs? Any thoughts??

Thanks in advance

[hstagner]

Hello Tolanid,

Your best best is going to be to run ESX / ESXi on VMware Workstation 7 on your laptop. Workstation 7 has ESX/ESXi 4 as a supported guest OS, so you don't have to edit the config files like you used to on Workstation 6.5.

Also, even if you do manage to get ESX/ESXi installed directly on your laptop how will you access your ESX Servers / VM's? You need a machine with the VI Client, so you will need to carry around two laptops if you want to be self sufficient. I hope this helps.

Don't forget to mark this answer "correct" or "helpful" if you found it useful (you'll get points too).

Regards,

Harley Stagner

VCP3, VCP4

[tolanid]

So what's wrong with ESX 4 running the VMs, Another ESX4 with another VM running the vclient to manage the first ESX? I was actually planning to get AD running and testing multiple vcenter connections (ADAM); all on this one laptop. Too drastic? Would it be too much to go even further and get storage vmotion with openfiler or something (more VMs).

Does it make sense?

[DSTAVERT]

With ESX(i) you would not have access to the Virtual Machine screen. All you would see on the laptop is the Yellow Console screen or in the case of ESX just the Linux console login. The suggestion to use Workstation is the best solution. You wouldn't have the, almost certain hardware incompatibility issues. In workstation you could install multiple copies of ESX(i) and vCenter. You can install multiple Virtual Machines in each of the ESX(i) virtual Machines.