I want to run OpenStack Folsom inside of an ESXi VM for a lab environment. Motiviation for this stems from wanting to be able to restore snapshots to a known good working state.

I get OpenStack installed and running in the VM (on ESXi). My nove-compute.conf looks like this ...

root@cloud1:~# cat /etc/nova/nova-compute.conf 
[DEFAULT]
compute_driver=libvirt.LibvirtDriver
libvirt_type=qemu

Trouble is, I can't get an image to boot.

I have tried the following two images...

cirros-0.3.0-x86_64-disk.img
cirros-0.3.0-i386-disk.img

When I try to boot a 64bit image I get this error:

This kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detected an i686 CPU

When I try to boot the i386 image the log spits out some hardware messages that look like their from dmesg, but that's it... it seems to crash, but when I checked all my nova logs I couldn't figure out why.

Any help is appreciated. It seems no one has put anything up on google about how to run OpenStack inside of an ESXi VM...only VBox and Fusion. As I said this is very suprising because for a lab environment where students are able to mess up their OpenStack controller, snapshots will really come in handy.

For what it's worth I'm running ESXi 5.1 & have a cluster configured in vCenter for 2 Rackable C1001's L5520 nahalem -vt processors. I plan to run everything on one VM/node, and use the other as a compute node.

Clarifying one more time, these ESXi nodes are running only 1 VM each, cloud1, and cloud2 respectively.