VMotion from physical ESX 4 to virtual ESX 4

May 19, 2009 in Virtualizationism | 13 comments

In yesterday’s post I showed how VMware ESX 4 can be run as a guest OS inside a virtual machine on ESX 4. As a follow-up, here is an interesting feat that can be performed with such a configuration: migrate a running VM with VMotion from the physical ESX host to the virtual ESX host.

Both the physical and virtual ESX systems are connected to a shared iSCSI LUN.

Related posts:

  1. VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself
  2. VMware vSphere can virtualize itself + 64-bit nested guests
  3. vSphere Console Stays Connected During VMotion
  4. Taking snapshots of VMware ESX 4 running in a VM
  5. Microsoft Private Cloud: No CSV Allowed!

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  1. Bobbi Perrin’s avatar

    Bobbi Perrin on May 19, 2009 at 10:11 am

    Hi Eric,

    Is there supposed to be a screenshot for this blog post?

    Reply

  2. Eric Gray’s avatar

    Eric Gray on May 19, 2009 at 10:21 am

    There is a YouTube video embedded. Do you not see it? If not, what browser are you using, etc?

    Reply

  3. Bobbi Perrin’s avatar

    Bobbi Perrin on May 19, 2009 at 10:25 am

    Thanks Eric, I see it now, don’t know what the problem was. I am still running IE 7.

    Looks great!

    BTW any comment on the AMD / Microsoft Live Migration announcement the other day? :-)

    Great information!

    -Bobbi

    Reply

  4. Kevin Chan’s avatar

    Kevin Chan on May 26, 2009 at 6:07 pm

    Is there any trick to set on the nested VM? I am able to power on the nested VM with the “monitor_control.restrict_backdoor / TRUE” trick but when I open the console of the powered on VM, I just get blank screen.

    I am running ESX 4 VM on top of ESX 4.

    Reply

  5. Eric Gray’s avatar

    Eric Gray on May 27, 2009 at 8:16 am

    Kevin, that should be sufficient. Hard to say what is going on… are there sufficient resources on your machine?

    Reply

  6. Kevin Chan’s avatar

    Kevin Chan on May 28, 2009 at 5:06 am

    Eric,

    Thanks for your reply. I think I have identified the problem. It is the AMD Athlon X2 7750 CPU that I am using. I have tried it on the Intel E6750 then everything works perfect.

    On the AMD, the VM was started but it is not actually running. It would run at high CPU but nothing happened. No BIOS screen, totally nothing but just a blank screen.

    Kevin

    Reply

  7. Eric Gray’s avatar

    Eric Gray on May 28, 2009 at 9:54 am

    Excellent, thanks for following up.

    Reply

  10. Nicolas’s avatar

    Nicolas on October 12, 2009 at 10:49 am

    Hi,

    VMs could not start in virtual ESX : no bios, 100% cpu,
    I just bought a dual opteron for a lab, does somebody think of a possible hack ?

    Nicolas

    Reply

  11. tymad95’s avatar

    tymad95 on August 3, 2010 at 9:08 pm

    How many nics are configured on each esx host? Can this be done with a single nic on each esx host?

    Reply

  12. Samuel’s avatar

    Samuel on June 15, 2011 at 4:40 pm

    Hi Eric,

    Thanks for sharing this useful information.

    But I can’t vmotion between vESXs. Here you only showed pESX to vESX. How about vESX to vESX？

    Thanks.

    Samuel

    Reply

  13. Michal’s avatar

    Michal on November 22, 2011 at 12:36 pm

    Hi,

    I have a problem. I installed 2 esx 5 under workstation 8 and made all important thinks to enable HA and vMOTION. vMOTION is running properly, but I have a problem with HA. There is wasrning message, that my hw is not supported for HA. I have a Xeon 3440 CPU and it supported on the vmware site for ha. VT is enabled in bios. Do you have an idea, why I is not working?

    Thanks.

    Reply

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