Hey guys-

I've seen plenty of posts regarding installing esxi as a base and then creating a vm of unraid.

 

What i'm looking to do is keep my base OS as unraid, and install something like esxi (or esxi) on unraid and create a vm or two (windows and/or linux).  Anyone able to tell me a) if this is possible and b) if anyone has done it and c) if you have done it, how did you accomplish it?

 

It does not have to be esxi of course.  Any application that would allow the building of a small vm.

 

Thanks in advance

 

al

Sounds like Virtualbox is what you're looking for:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10978.0

 

Thanks kaiguy.  Will take a look.  Appreciate the info!

I would be VERY surprised if it could be done that way since unraid is not a complete operating system, but a stripped down version for specific applications.  For example: various command structures and support files are missing from unRaid that VM's need.  Again example: C source libraries and such.  By the time you add all that stuff you could have installed 50 full distributions of slackware.

 

If i'm wrong, I will stand corrected, but the kernel used in unRaid is not a "full" kernel either, limiting what you may want to do.

 

ESXi is built from the ground up to manage hardware resources (think Hyper-Visor), and has enough libraries and such to support various VM installation configurations.  Including compilers.

 

Install a full system of "Slackware", integrate unRaid, then install your VM's if you want to.  Takes some work, but it should not have ANY limitations when your done.

 

Let me know how you get along, if you try it.  Good developer stuff.

 

Vic

I would be VERY surprised if it could be done that way

I've got virtualbox running with several VM's, I run an XP VM and a minecraft server VM full time, and have several others including windows 7, various flavors of ubuntu, slackware, and a couple other misc. distributions running just for fun. Base unraid with virtualbox and the phpvirtualbox interface to manage it. If you want to compile it yourself you have to go through all the header stuff, but one of the other members is nice enough to make precompiled packages available that are easy to install, so the barrier to entry is very low. Follow the link that kaiguy posted.

Good stuff.  Thanks guys.

 

Will need to add memory at a minimum to begin.