Install VMware ESXI 7.0 on ODYSSEY X86J4105

VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is a type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. A hypervisor (or virtual machine monitor, VMM) is computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. And there are two types of it.

The Type 1 hypervisor is referred to as the “bare-metal” hypervisor. This means that it runs directly on the physical hardware of the host machine — it doesn’t have to load an underlying Operating System before that. Due to the fact that type 1 hypervisors have direct access to the underlying hardware (and no other Operating Systems and device drivers to content with) this type of hypervisor is considered to be the best performing and most efficient for enterprise computing.

Type 2 hypervisors are typically installed on an existing Operating System. This makes it a hosted hypervisor, seeing as it relies on the host machine’s OS to undertake certain operations like managing calls to the CPU, managing network resources, managing memory and storage.

The difference between type-1 and type-2 hypervisors can be illustrated by the following picture. The main drawback of type-2 is that, once your host is down, all of your virtual machines will be down.

But type 1 hypervisors use hardware acceleration software and cannot function without the availability of this technology. That’s why some of our customers asked whether our ODYSSEY X86J4105 supports VMware ESXI.

The answer is definitely yes. We used Celeron® J4105 processor from Intel® which is equipped with Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x). Thus, with a 4-core CPU and 8 GB memory, you can easily run 3 to 4 virtual machines directly on hardware with ESXI installed. Besides, there is a web console provided by ESXI which allows you to do remote control.

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