Friday, November 20, 2015

Installing ESXi in a QEMU-KVM virtual machine, under libvirt / virt-manager

For a test setup, it may be useful to install VMware ESXi in a QEMU-KVM guest. If, like me, you're using libvirt (using virt-manager) to manage your VMs, here's some information to get this set up. I'm using Fedora 22, and ESXi 5.5.0.

There are other posts explaining how to set this up, but I wanted to share my experience, which is specific to virt-manager, and the newer QEMU.

Here's a step-by-step procedure for getting this working.


Add required KVM kernel module parameters:

  1. Edit (or create) /etc/modprobe.d/kvm-intel.conf to look like this:
    options kvm ignore_msrs=1
    options kvm-intel nested=y ept=y
    
  2. Remove the KVM module and re-load it with the new parameters:
    # modprobe -r kvm-intel kvm; modprobe kvm kvm-intel

Setup ESXi VM guest configuration:

  1. Create your ESXi VM using virt-manager.
  2. Change the NIC to vmxnet3. You'll have to manually type this in; it won't be in the drop-down.
  3. You'll need at least 2 GiB of RAM. (During install it actually came back with:
    <MEMORY_SIZE ERROR: This host has 2.00 GiB of RAM. 3.97 GiB are needed>
  4. Edit the config for this VM (named "esxi-test" here):
    # virsh -c 'qemu:///system' edit esxi-test
  5. Edit the first line of the XML file to be:
    <domain type='kvm' xmlns:qemu='http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0'>
  6. Change the CPU type:
    <cpu mode='host-passthrough'/>
  7. Add this block anywhere inside of <domain>...</domain>:
      <qemu:commandline>
        <qemu:arg value='-machine'/>
        <qemu:arg value='vmport=off'/>
      </qemu:commandline>
    
  8. Save and quit
Boot into the ESXi installer, and enjoy!

In dmesg, I see kvm spewing these messages, which probably have to do with ignroe_msrs:

kvm [3864]: vcpu0 ignored rdmsr: 0x34
kvm [3864]: vcpu0 ignored rdmsr: 0x34


ESXi 6.0.0 Notes:

I tried to use ESXi 6.0.0, but it didn't seem to find a network card, even though I specified vmnet3. These notes apply to 6.0.0:

  • Note that the installer appears to hang at "user loaded successfully." for about 110 seconds. "Running nfcd start" also takes a while. I have no idea why.

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