Tips on booting ESXi host in InfraSIM

Below are tips on booting ESXi in InfraSIM.

• You can download ESXi image from official VMWare site.

• For YML configuration. Refer to http://infrasim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration.html. Pay special attention to below options in YML file. The memory is suggested to be greater than 4096. The features should be set to +vmx as below:

  compute:
      cpu: 
          features: +vmx
  

  For networks section, If network_mode is set to bridge, device should be set according to actual virtual nic type. Set the bootable drive file to path to ESXi image in local VM to run InfraSIM in, and set boot index to that drive device.

• Check module parameters in VM. The /sys/module/kvm/parameters/ignore_msrs must be 1 or Y. For Intel processor, /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nested must be 1 or Y. For AMD processor /sys/module/kvm_amd/parameters/nested must be 1 or Y.

• Please set machine option properly like below if you want to launch QEMU manually with controller lsisas3008, as by default qemu only support pci bus rather than pcie:

  qemu-system-x86_64 -machine q35 -device lsisas3008
  

Heads up:

We have some limitation as below, but will add support for them in future.

- For 'networks' section, if network_mode is set to nat, device option value e1000 is required. That's to say, 'vmxnet3' is not supported currently. - We will add support to boot a bootable drive under lsisas3008 controller in future. But it's not supported now.