Dynamox is correct, as usual. Run it through the converter to deploy on ESXi. It works very well. I run two ESXi servers in my home lab, each running 4-node virtual Isilon clusters. The converter is very handy and allows you to 'rerun' a conversion job with the same parameters, which is nice for deploying multiple VM instances in parallel.
Enjoy the VM. One advantage of running it on ESXi is that you can change the sizes of the four disks used to hold /ifs. In my home lab I make them 64GB each, so the node has 256GB of storage and in turn the 4-node cluster is 1 TB. Under Fusion or Workstation this is not possible.
I would definitely recommend a multi-core machine with 4G+ of RAM ;8G would do nicely. An SSD will also greatly help performance when running the virtual nodes.
To run virtual nodes on an ESX server, they must be converted with the converter tool from VMware. Use the converter tool for vCenter or download and install VMware vCenter Converter standalone. Both are free.
Once you have the VM on your ESX server, if you want to run more than one node, you will then just convert it to a template and create new VMs from that template.
dynamox
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Posted March 11th, 2014 08:00
free download from VMware, i documented the steps on my blog
Deploying virtual Isilon on ESXi | Storage Monkey