I downloaded and installed the latest VMWare vSphere Hypervisor ESXi and created a bootable USB key from the .iso image. It is now installed and I’m going to experiment with it.
Right now I’m installing a Windows 10 guest just out of curiosity as to how well it will perform handling graphics-intensive tasks through the hypervisor layer. In order to install Windows 10 in the hypervisor I had to extract the product key from the computer’s EFI firmware using the following command when booted from a rescue disk:
sudo tail -c+57 /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
When you install Windows 10 normally it will read this embedded product key and not prompt for one, however when installing in the hypervisor it will ask for it.
In the past I tried running Photoshop inside a VMWare Workstation virtual machine but the result was not really usable. So how much of a difference will there be with ESXi?
I doesn’t really matter that much – it’s not my intention to really use Windows 10 this way. More useful will be to run actual Linux virtual machines as servers for various things I run.
How much better this solution is to running LXC virtual machines or to running Docker images I don’t know. I’ve actually been leaning towards setting up a Docker-based system.
This will be useful experience. I can put “VMWare ESXi experience” on my resume.
But it seems like Docker containers are really optimized and more efficient. Running a full-blown Linux operating system in a virtual machine seems like too much resources. Well, I will experiment and see.
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