While continuing my exploration trip down memory lane with early VMware Hypervisors such as VMware GSX Server, VMware Server and VMware Workstation, I came across the following error message when attempting to install these hypervisors within a Windows VM:
Sorry this product can not be installed inside of a virtual machine
I guess this would make sense given the ability to run a Hypervisor (Nested Virtualization) within a VM would not be possible for many more years later and this check seemed like a good way to prevent users from having a bad user experience, however it prevent me from continuing.
After a bit of digging and researching, I came to find that there was a workaround for this by inserting a special Windows registry key that would bypass the check. The key would be an empty REG_BINARY called InstallInVM under the path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\Misc as shown in the screenshot below.
You can also add the Windows registry key by using the following registry script:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\Misc] "InstallInVM"=hex:
After adding the new registry key, you will need to reboot the system before the change goes into effect and now you can install these early VMware Hypervisors which have these pre-checks.
Hi Willian, Thank you I installed GSX over VM Windows 2003, however when i tried to power up the vm -for Novell 4- over GSX and it appears this message "You may not power on VMware GSX in a virtual machine". Did you power on vm over a GSX over a ESX host? Regards
Yes, for my setup ESXi was used as the bare-metal Hypervisor and then GSX ran on top as a regular VM. Did you apply the workaround on your Windows 2003 VM?
Yes, I did it, i added the registry entry that allowed me to install GSX but not to run a vm.