Installing VMWare - PC Specialist Laptop

[peds2002]

Hi, I’m new to VMWare and I’m trying to install VMWare on a PC Specialist Recoil 16. It is using a i9-13800HX and has 64gb Ram and 2 SSD’s.

Visualization is enabled in the bios bt when I try to install ESXI v8 I get a pink screen which I have attached. I have tired to bybass the CPU check which makes it go a little further in the install process but still fails,

Any ideas please.

[Rod-IT]

Your system is not officially supported, so it comes with risks.

Specifically the CPU, since this uses big.LITTLE architecture (performance and efficiency cores) which ESXi doesn’t natively support.

Your CPU is a consumer CPU and ESXi is meant for server space CPUs. In a home-lab setup, that’s fine, but it’s still something you should be mindful of.

There are ways to work around this but you do so noting you may still have further issues and this is not something you should use for production.

ByPass Fatal CPU mismatch: Esxi Screen Of death - Jim Mavridis

The screen you see is known as a PSOD, purple screen of death.

It’s not known what network card/device this PC uses, but if it’s Realtek, that will be your next issue. ESXi does not support drivers for Realtek cards either, so you’ll have an install with no networks, rendering the install pointless.

If this is for a home lab, Hyper-V or Promox may be better options.

Laptops are usually not supported either from a driver perspective, so you may have an install, but not functional.

FYI, ESXi needs another device to be able to manage it, if this laptop is your only device, you wont be able to run VMs on it from the console.

[matt7863 (m@ttshaw)]

If the purpose is just to learn esxi then one option is to use nested virtualization.
Install a supported OS on your device like Linux (then use KVM)/windows (then use hyper-v) and then create a VM. install esxi into this VM.
It sounds crazy but one you connect to that VM you can ignore the real OS etc and you have a working esxi install perfect for learning.

Or an old desktop with supported CPU/NIC is often the easiest thing to use.

[adrian_ych]

@peds2002

Any ideas please.

There used to be something called the VMware Compatibility Matrix as there are only certain CPUs and/or machines that can “accept” ESXi 7 or 8.

If you are using a PC or lappy, I would highly recommend that you use back the original Windows OS (like Win10 or Win11) then use VMware Workstation which is now free…

[peds2002]

Thanks for responses and advice,

In the end I used Proxmox which installed perfectly on my laptop and has all the functionality I need.

Thanks again

[Rod-IT]

Can you go ahead and mark this topic as solved by selecting the post that best answered your question.