WilliamLam.com

  • About
    • About
    • Privacy
  • VMware Cloud Foundation
  • VKS
  • Homelab
    • Hardware Options
    • Hardware Reviews
    • Lab Deployment Scripts
    • Nested Virtualization
    • Homelab Podcasts
  • VMware Nostalgia
  • Apple

How to run Qemu & KVM on ESXi?

09.17.2014 by William Lam // 4 Comments

Last week I was asked whether ESXi could run the KVM hypervisor as a Virtual Machine (often referred to as Nested Virtualization). I personally have not used KVM before or run it on top of ESXi, but I have heard of many folks successfully virtualizing KVM as a Virtual Machine on top of ESXi. I figure since I have already written several articles on Nesting VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen on top of ESXi, I might as well also take a look at KVM!

Disclaimer: Nested Virtualization is not supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

As mentioned already, I have not used KVM before and one thing I wanted to understand before trying to run it as a Virtual Machine is what the difference is between Qemu and KVM as I have heard both these terms used in-conjunction before. I found this post to be quite helpful in helping me understand the differences between Qemu, KQemu and KVM. I recommend a read if you are new to Qemu or KVM like I am.

From the article above, we now see that you can run either Qemu as a standalone system or KVM which is an accelerator that runs on top of Qemu. With this, I will now demonstrate how you can run Qemu as well as KVM as Virtual Machine on top of ESXi. In the example below, I have selected the latest Ubuntu release (14.04.1) to run both Qemu and KVM.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Nested Virtualization, vSphere Tags // ESXi, kqemu, kvm, nested, nested virtualization, qemu

Search

Thank Author

Author

William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

Connect

  • Bluesky
  • Email
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • Mastodon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Recent

  • VCF 9.0 Hardware Considerations 05/30/2025
  • VMware Flings is now available in Free Downloads of Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) 05/19/2025
  • VMUG Connect 2025 - Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x in a Box  05/15/2025
  • Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) 05/06/2025
  • Quick Tip - Validating Broadcom Download Token  05/01/2025

Advertisment

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Copyright WilliamLam.com © 2025