Finally after several attempts, i’ve been able to install VMWare ESXi into VMware Workstation 6.5. The intend of doing this is purely to get familiar with the product. To get this done, i have been mainly following the instructions provided by xtravirt.com
Once installed i had some challenges with transfering files through the Virtual Infrastructure Client datastore browser where i received I/O errors. After some troubleshooting it appears to be related to the network , switch configuration which i haven’t solved yet. The workaround i used for the time being is to configure the ESXi vmware network setting to “host” only instead of “Bridged”.
Another interesting learning was that ESXi officially does not provide support for SSH, but this can be enabled thorugh an unsupported hack which is described here. Once ssh is enabled, you can also transfer files to the datastore using WinSCP.
The VI client – if you head to storage, and then double click the store, it opens an interface to upload files into the data store. I used this to create an ISO store there, and the whole thing is very nice.