Install-Windows-8-On-VMware-Player-Step7_thumb.jpg' alt='Install Windows 8 Vmware Esxi Versions Of Windows' title='Install Windows 8 Vmware Esxi Versions Of Windows' />Multiboot ESXi 5, Windows 2. R2, RHEL 6, Xen. Server 6. Congratulations, you decided to be the ultimate hypervisor egalitarian and install every mainstream hypervisor KVM onto a single server. You setup Windows 2. Redhat to dual boot 1. I could have accomplished this project via constantly swapping harddrives when I needed to change hypervisors, but that seemed more like accepting the problem than a solution. My initial plan was to divide my six harddrives into 4 logical volumes at the raid controller level. Unfortunately the raid controller for servers I was using Im going to refrain from plugging any one vendor, at least as long as Im operating on other peoples hardware doesnt provide this functionality. Windows 7 Android 1.5 Apk on this page. For a brief moment I flirted with the idea of cutting up the disk using partitions, until a closer look at ESXi and Xens installation revealed they dont provide any granularity in setup of the partition tables beyond selecting an installation volume. Install Windows 8 Vmware Esxi Versions Of Firefox' title='Install Windows 8 Vmware Esxi Versions Of Firefox' />Instead of telling this story as it happened, Im going to first go over the hiccups I encountered on the way. That way, incase youre like me and already started this project before doing your research, you can plan a bit before reading the whole article. VMware Boot Bank Corruption. Not sure how I accomplished this on the first server, because I couldnt replicate it on the second. I assumed it was because Microsoft was automounting the VMware Boot Banks they are formatted fat. Anywho, for quite a long time I was stuck with the error Not a VMware Boot Bank. VMware provides very little information on this error and not applicable to my situation. Unfortunately VMware also doesnt seem to provide a way to fix a corrupted Boot Bank, so I was forced to reinstall. Afterwards I ran this command to prevent Windows from auto mounting these volumes diskpart. Windows installing onto the wrong drives. PowerCLI script to help correlate vCenter, ESXi vSAN buildversions wo manual VMware KB lookup. VMware Workstation is a hosted hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems an x86 version of earlier releases was available it. While Microsoft is nice enough to ask you which drive youd like to install Windows on, that doesnt mean itll listen. Unfortunately while it will install your C drive to the selected partition, it will install the 1. MB System Reserved partition which it boots from to where it sees fit. On a system with lots of unformatted drives like mine, and where I was installing Windows to not the first volume, it chose to put the system reserved partition and the MBR for windows on the first volume set, ensuring that it would be booted automatically. I ended up fixing this by only leaving in the disks for Windows during its installation process, then inserting the other disks after it was done. Xen. Server is scared of VMFS volumes. Citrix,its ok to be scared, but you need to face your fears. Every time I booted the Xen installer it would die when it got the point of scanning the drives with the error Could not parse Sgdisk. From what I found via a quick google, this is due to an inability of the Xen 6 installer to handle VMFS volumes. Citrix, this is no way to convert followers away from VMware. I resolved this by making sure the disk I was installing Xen to was formatted and pulling the other disks out of the server during the installation of Xen. Server. Xen. Server is scared of GPT volumes. Not sure if this was just from me, or why this was occuring, but I had to follow these instructions to get past a GPT error which occurred during the installation of Xen 6 1. Boot from the Xen. Install Windows 8 Vmware Esxi Versions Of The BibleServer 6. CDROM. At the Xen 6. When you get the new menu screen press TAB4. VMware ESXi is the industryleading, purposebuilt baremetal hypervisor. ESXi installs directly onto your physical server enabling it to be partitioned into multiple. Hi David, Just an example to explain the windows server licensing model for two ESX server if each server has 8 X core 2lic of Windows Server 2016. VMware ESXi formerly ESX is an enterpriseclass, type1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type1 hypervisor, ESXi is. Experts Exchange Articles HOW TO Connect to the VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5. ESXi 5. 1 using the vSphere Client. Install Windows 8 Vmware Esxi Versions Of The Bible ListBCDedit wont modify the configuration if its not the primary disk. I promoted this to its own blog post. The actual project. For these four hypervisors, there are three different boot loaders used, and two major versions of one of those boot loaders Windows 2. R2. Bootmgr. Red. Hat Enterprise Linux. Grub. VMware ESXi 5. Shinee The World Where You Exist Instrumental. Syslinux 3. 8. 6Citrix Xen. Server 6. Syslinux 4. My original goal was to use Grub with RHEL 6 to load everything else. This turned out to be a much simpler task than the hours of time I burned on it made it appear. I thought the errors I was receiving in ESXi due to a corrupted boot bank were from some problem with Grub chainloading Syslinux, turns out i had really just corrupted my boot bank. Boot everything from Grub. This turned out to be rather simple due to support for something called chainloading. My final working grub configuration is grub. Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file. NOTICE You have a boot partition. This means that. all kernel and initrd paths are relative to boot, eg. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2. NOLUKS KEYBOARDTYPEpc KEYTABLEus LANGenUS. UTF 8 rdNOMD quiet SYSFONTlatarcyrheb sun. NODM rdLVMLVvgccskvmvmh. LVMLVvgccskvmvmh. Windows 2. 00. 8 R2. Xen. Server 6. rootnoverify hd. Grub simply hands off booting to the MBR on the respective drives, and the boot loaders for the other hypervisors takes it from there. Of course since this didnt initially work for me, I went through all the additional effort to also make this for from ESXis and Xens Syslinux to boot everything, and I made an effort but did not finish making Bootmgr boot everything else. Boot everything from ESXi 5 Syslinux 3. This works pretty much the same way, with two major caveats. First, VMware was not nice enough to ship menu. ESXi 5.   Therefore you need to go here, download Syslinux 3. Second, ESXi doesnt mount its first partition, so you cant do any of this from within ESXis console. Id recommend a linux boot disk, or if you chose to dual boot with RHEL 6, you can mount it from there. Youll know you have the right partition if you see the files syslinux. How To Patch Up Plaster Wall. Copy chain. c. 32 and menu. Now backup syslinux. ESXi 5. COM3. 2 safeboot. Windows 2. 00. 8 R2. COM3. 2 chain. c. Xen. Server 6. COM3. Red. Hat Enterprise 6. COM3. 2 chain. c. Pretty simple. Boot everything from Xen 6 Syslinux 4. Citrix was nice enough to include both menu. I didnt check to see if they mounted this within their OS or not, and simply edited it out of band anyways. Since I was already done with most everything at this point, I didnt change it to use the menu config but instead left it with requiring you to enter the label at the boot prompt. The file you want to edit this time is extlinux. Again, I suggest making a backup first location mbr. M lowmememergencypool1. M crashkernel6. 4M3. M console vgamode 0x. LABELroot ckxrtmdk ro xenconshvc consolehvc. Xen. Server Serial. M lowmememergencypool1. M crashkernel6. 4M3. M bootvmlinuz 2. LABELroot ckxrtmdk ro consoletty. Xen. Server in Safe Mode. M com. 11. 15. 20. LABELroot ckxrtmdk ro consoletty. Xen. Server Xen 4. Linux 2. 6. 3. 2. M lowmememergencypool1. M crashkernel6. 4M3. M bootvmlinuz 2. LABELroot ckxrtmdk ro xenconshvc consolehvc. Xen. Server Serial, Xen 4. Linux 2. 6. 3. 2. M lowmememergencypool1. M crashkernel6. 4M3. M bootvmlinuz 2. LABELroot ckxrtmdk ro consoletty. Boot everything from Bootmgr. First note, I never actually go this working. Booting Grub from Bootmgr is easy. Im sureits possible somehow to boot Syslinux from Bootmgr, but after accomplishing the above tasks this seemed like a trivial exercise. Still, I figured Id list what I did. First I pulled the mbr off each of the disks dd ifdevsda oftmplinux. Then I copied the files I created to the root of the C drive for Windows. Then within BCD edit I ran bcdedit create d Linux application BOOTSECTOR.