Getting Windows 8 or 2012 to work as a guest under vSphere 4.1

There have been other blogs and kbase articles that define how to get Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 2012 / 2012 R2 running under vSphere 4.1.  I plan to to offer you a complete document with references

For the guest configuration, I would choose the following:

Windows 2012 / 2012 R2
Guest OS: Windows 2008 R2
vCPU: 2
vMemory: 2GB
Network Card:  E1000

Windows 8 / 8.1
Guest OS: Windows 7 (32 or 64 to match your media)
vCPU: 2, but 1 should work
vMemory:     1GB, but 2 would be better
Network Card:    E1000

After you build the OS, but before the OS is installed the VMX file needs to be modified, so use the vSphere client to do these steps

1. Browse to the datastore where the VMX files is located
2. Download the VMX file to your windows system
3. Edit the file with a Linux compatible editor like Notepad++ and add the following lines:
1. bios440.filename = bios.440.rom
   mce.enable = "TRUE"
   cpuid.hypervisor.v0 = "FALSE"
   vmGenCounter.enable = "FALSE

Then upload the updated VMX file and the bios ROM file from this location.  If you feel a little unsure about using a random file acquired from the internet there are directions on how to extract the file from VMware Player.  I have not done this yet, but trust the ROM file that is the VMware community

Next just install the OS as normal, it should work fine, no BSOD.

Now what I have not seen is anything on VMware tools, and from what it looks like any version of the VMware tools that come with 4.1 will corrupt the video and make  it unusable, so when installing VMware tools, use the OSP version.

Here is the root location of all the tools:  http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/index.html
Here is the version that I have used successfully:  http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/5.5p01/windows/index.html
But guessing the latest which is for vSphere 6 would also work:

• 64-bit http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/latest/windows/x64/VMware-tools-windows-9.4.11-2400950.iso
• 32-bit: http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/latest/windows/x86/VMware-tools-windows-9.4.11-2400950.iso

If you want read more about OSP tools, this page is useful.

Good luck with your Window 8 / 2012 builds!!

Windows 8 / 2012 on ESXi 4.0 / 4.1 hosts

OK, so others have documented on how to enable using Windows 8 and Server 2012 with an ESXi 4.0 / 4.1 host.  I am not going to recreate the procedure, but here are links to some:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/394669
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/312358-how-to-install-windows-2012-server-on-esxi-4-1
http://en.blog.skydriver.org/2013/02/03/windows-server-2012-and-windows-8-on-vmware-esxi-4-1/

What I was curious about was where this bios.440.rom file came from and is it safe.  From the first reference from the VMware communities it came from a vmware employee.  Did some more searching and found these two sites that detailed building / modifying BIOS-es

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/19329-HOWTO-Modify-VMWare-BIOS-with-SLIC-2-1

While it was detailed, and looked like it used some files that were coming from questionable sources, the original toolkit was sound

http://www.bios.net.cn/Files/soft/biosfile/qt/SLIC_ToolKit_V3.2.rar

So I concluded to accept the file and not research further.