Setup your Apple MacBook Pro with VMware ESXi on top of Fusion

I have been messing around with VMware ESXi on my Apple MacBook Pro laptop for a while now. Actually, I have installed ESXi on top of VMware Fusion. Further, I networked everything together so my Apple MacBook Pro can communicate with ESXi and the Virtual Machines (VMs) installed on ESXi as well as the VMs installed on Fusion.

This is a great test bed. I can develop with Eclipse on my MacBook and connect to my ESXi server. I can also start-up the Windows VM on Fusion to connect to ESXi with vSphere client (vSphere client doesn’t run on Macs). Several people have asked me how to accomplish this, so I have put together an outline of the setup below.

- Apple Macbook Pro with two 2.4 GHz Intel Core Duo CPUs and 4 GB RAM
- ESXi 4.1 installed on top of VMware Fusion
- VMs installed on ESXi
- Windows installed on Fusion to use vSphere Client
- Laptop, ESXi, and VMs all on the same subnet – 192.168.1.0 
     * Used 2 NICs (The built-in Ethernet adapter and an USB to Ethernet adapter)
     * Two NICs connected together will bring up the adapters that communication 
        will take place through