Question about virtualizing HPE VM Essentials within a test environment

[lsantiagos01]

Hi everyone,

I have a question regarding HPE VM Essentials usage in a lab or test environment.

For testing purposes, is it possible to virtualize an HPE VM Essentials environment inside itself — for example, running the VM Essentials stack as virtual machines on the same physical server where it is installed?

The goal is to simulate a small production setup for validation, training, or automation testing, without requiring additional hardware.

Thank you in advance for the clarification!

Best regards,

Santiago

[lsantiagos01]

I found the Information:

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=sd00006775en_us&docLocale=en_US&page=GUID-226C1DD5-E007-4F44-A215-2FC03C269EA5.html

An HVM cluster using the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) Layout consists of at least three hosts. Physical hosts are recommended to experience full performance of the solution. In smaller environments, it is possible to create an HVM cluster with three nested virtual machines, a single physical host (non-HCI only), or a single nested virtual machine (non-HCI only) though performance may be reduced. With just one host it won’t be possible to migrate workloads between hosts or take advantage of automatic failover. Currently, the default cluster layout requires hosts be a pre-existing Ubuntu 24.04 box with environment and host system requirements described in this section. An earlier cluster layout requiring Ubuntu 22.04 is also included. VM Essentials handles cluster configuration by providing the IP address(es) for your host(s) and a few other details. Details on adding the cluster to VM Essentials are contained in the next section

Santiago Silva

[PeterTzvetanov]

Hello Santiago,

you can install as VM the ubuntu hosts(HVM 24.04 surely, just don't install on ESXi backend based virtulazation the HWE 6.1x kernel, the 6.8.x is sufficient). In my lab for example I have 4 VMs with 25GB memory, the CPUs are 10 with the settings 5 core per socket for the socket reduction to 2 only, the network you can use bonds but you need to have 2 different NICs in the backend and active-backup only as that is the restriction in the virtulized environments. But it works, for storage I use iSCSI, because it is easier to be done in that testing, compared to FC. If you are having some questions feel free to send to hpe-sw-trial-vmessentials@hpe.com and I can present you my lab configuration.

With regards