ESXi Virtual Appliance

As you may know, you can install hypervisors on virtual machines for testing purpose. When you had installed ESXi on virtual machine, you did nesting virtualization.

But think about installation process, any installation needs around 20 minutes and if you cloned a ESXi machine, it will be not worked properly on other virtual machine and you have to change your configuration manually.

Now there is good solution and it’s ESXi virtual appliance. You can download ESXi OVA file and import it to your host or vCenter and also you can configure it during import process.

ESXi virtual appliance is available at the below links:

• ESXi 6.0 Virtual Appliance download link
• ESXi 5.5 Virtual Appliance download link 

ESXi virtual appliance maybe updated after releasing new version. The last versions are:

• ESXi 6.0 U2
• ESXi 5.5 U3

The ESXi virtual appliance including the below configurations:

1. ESXi 6.0 U2:
   1. ESXi 6.0 Update 2
   2. GuestType: ESXi 5.x (backwards compat)
   3. vHW 10
   4. 2 vCPU
   5. 6GB vMEM
   6. 2 x vmxnet3 vNIC
   7. 1 x 2GB HDD (ESXi Installation)
   8. 1 x 4GB SSD (for use w/VSAN, empty by default)
   9. 1 x 8GB SSD (for use w/VSAN, empty by default)
   10. VHV added
   11. dvFilter Mac Learn VMX params added
   12. disk.enableUUID VMX param added
   13. VSAN traffic tagged on vmk0
   14. Disabled VSAN device monitoring for home labs
2. ESXi 5.5 U3
   1. ESXi 5.5 Update 3b
   2. GuestType: ESXi 5.x
   3. vHW 10
   4. 2 vCPU
   5. 6GB vMEM
   6. 2 x vmxnet3 vNIC
   7. 1 x 2GB HDD (ESXi Installation)
   8. 1 x 4GB SSD (for use w/VSAN, empty by default)
   9. 1 x 8GB HDD (for use w/VSAN, empty by default)
   10. VHV added
   11. dvFilter Mac Learn VMX params added
   12. disk.enableUUID VMX param added
   13. VSAN traffic tagged on vmk0
   14. Disabled VSAN device monitoring for home labs
   15. ESXi Embedded Host Client

You can read William Lam blog post about deploying the virtual appliance.