Dear all, to support our basic virtualization technologies lab, our colleague, Áron Tóth has developed a "virtualESXi" module that enables ESXi reservations - that is, the user gets an ESXi 5.x instance or cluster (and hypothetically, the VMs located in its local datastore during VCL image capture - currently we start clean ESXi-s) instead of a Linux/Windows/... instance. This is basically nested virtualization brought to VCL. VT-x or AMD-V hardware support is enough to start with, although you need Intel EPT or AMD RVI for running 64 bit guests on the virtualized hypervisor. Currently, our solution supports only ESXi over ESXi.
The OS module can be found at: https://svn.inf.mit.bme.hu/projects/vcl/esxi-module/ W.r.t. provisioning the standard VMware module can be used. A new Connectmethod was defined (vSphere client on port 443). Before capture, some preparatory steps have to be performed (see the SVN). VCL also has to be patched slightly (see the SVN). We intend to make this the cornerstone of "Cloud over Cloud" deployments as in "VCL over VCL" or "OpenStack over VCL" (something Áron is working on) - this is necessary for teaching cloud technologies and cyber-physical systems with VCL. Your comments and insights would be appreciated. The module was developed for our specific needs so it is not fully in-line with the usual VCL design philosophy and it is a bit rough around edges. Anyhow, if you think that the community would be interested in this functionality we are certainly open to polish it and document it properly. Best regards Imre Kocsis on behalf of the BME-DMIS VCL team --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Imre Kocsis assistant lecturer Fault Tolerant Systems Research Group Department of Measurement and Information Systems Budapest University of Technology and Economics mail: [email protected] phone: +36-1-463-2006 mobile: +36-20-514-6881 skype: kocsis_imre
