Run and use guest VM on ESXi hot without vsphere client

Hello,
I have some experience with using VMs mainly on VMware Player/Workstation and Virtul Box (Type 2 hypervisors). Now for purpose of learning I have installed ESXi host hypervisor on a bit older DELL server and using web client on the second PC over local network I have installed guest OS win XP.
Now my question is the following:
Do I need to use this another PC with to actually use guest OS on ESXi host machine?
I have already log in to ESXi console and power on the deployed VM, but guest OS is not actually staring with GUI so I can use monitor, keyboard and mouse connected to the host.

I assume main purpose of ESXi hypervisor host is to be installed on one separate sever on the network and to use different guest VMs by different other PCs on the network, but is it possible to actually run guest VM on a standalone ESXi host?

Thank you.

Askic said:

Hello,
I have some experience with using VMs mainly on VMware Player/Workstation and Virtul Box (Type 2 hypervisors). Now for purpose of learning I have installed ESXi host hypervisor on a bit older DELL server and using web client on the second PC over local network I have installed guest OS win XP.
Now my question is the following:
Do I need to use this another PC with to actually use guest OS on ESXi host machine?
I have already log in to ESXi console and power on the deployed VM, but guest OS is not actually staring with GUI so I can use monitor, keyboard and mouse connected to the host.

I assume main purpose of ESXi hypervisor host is to be installed on one separate sever on the network and to use different guest VMs by different other PCs on the network, but is it possible to actually run guest VM on a standalone ESXi host?

Thank you.

@Askic

Hi there
I think unless you have the Enterprise version of ESXi installed there is no way to access the VM directly from the Host machine it's running on.

This means in effect you have to access the VM from another computer via SSH, Telnet, RDP, XRDP, or whatever. It might be possible to SSH or Telnet to the VM if you have those commands available on the ESXI Host but I don't think you have those available with the required network setup.

A better way of testing this scenario if you want to try out the Free versions of Esxi is to run the ESXI machine itself as a VM (It's only a tiny OS so extra overhead is quite small) and create your VM's on Esxi as "2nd level VM's".

Linux hosts are usually better for this but there's no reason why a Windows Host couldn't do it as well.

If you don't mind using the extra computer e.g laptop for accessing the VM's Esxi is a Host good system for running VM's.

Cheers

jimbo