Running VMware ESXi 4.1 on VMware ESXi 4.0

It seem there’s some problem on installing VMware ESXi 4.1 on the ESXi 4.0 (which mentioned by “Eric Gray” on his site “vCritical” as an UPDATE for his article) and the underlying platform should be ESXi 4.1.
I have problem on installing it directly on the ESXi 4.0, but there’s always a way to reach the goal as here the goal is running ESXi 4.1 on ESXi 4.0.


So as my current PC at home have lots of program on it and there’s not enough memory on it, I’ve installed the ESXi 4.1 on my MAC OS X on VMware Fusion 3.1.0 using Thin-Provisioned disk and then moved the folder to my PC and open it with VMware Workstation 7.1.
One of the greatest feature in this version is built-in “Converter” which can be find under “File menu” with name of “Import or Export …”
I used the tools for converting this VM to OVF format and as far as I’ve used Thin-Provisioned disk, the result can be guessed, 208 MB.
And the last step, I’ve imported the OVF file to the my lab and powered on the guest OS for checking and it’s worked.
During importing the OVF the disk changed to the Thick disk, so I cloned the first VM to two new VMs and configured their virtual disks as Thin.

So in the end, there’s two ESXi 4.1 running on ESXi 4.0 and each one of them just used about 318 MB of the storage.

2 Comments

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  1. Nice article…but I am also unable to get 4.1 (or in fact any version) of ESXi to work on Fusion 3.1.1. I get the same error as you show above, when installing on Fusion also.

    Is there a “trick” to installing on Fusion I haven’t been able to find?

    Thanks!!

    1. Hi Simon,
      Thanks for your feedback, I’d check the installation again, but I didn’t get any error during installation of VMware ESXi 4.1 on VMware Fusion 3.1 and that screenshot (error) is for installing VMware ESXi 4.1 on VMware ESXi 4.0.
      I’m not sure about version of my Fusion but I will check it and send the result back.
      Also you can check this thread on VMware Community which pointing to the same problem.

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