Answered VMware Lab Storage - nested ESXi sharing a disk with ESXi Host

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I would like to build a home lab capable of supporting various scenarios to enable me to study ESXi & vSphere 6 including all of the cool features such as HA, FT, DRS, VSAN etc.

I have deployed a baremetal install of ESXi 6 from the USB stick, on the following hardware.

8 core CPU
64GB RAM
2 x 1GB Nic
2 x 10GB Nic
1 x IPMI

Disk 1 32GB USB (ESXi 6)
Disk 2 3TB WD Red, 1TB currently provisioned to vSphere (VMs & Some Data)
Disk 3 240 GB SSD fully provisioned in vSphere (VMs)

So far I have deployed the following VMs

Win12 - AD DS, DNS & DHCP
vCSA -
Win12 - Standard Domain Member
Win16 - Domain Member
Win10 - Client
Win12 - VUM

My aim as a minimum deploy a minimum of 2 Data Centers each with one or more ESXi Hosts, while attempting to deploy a nested ESXi the installation suggests this will format the entire disk it has been allocated, however this drive already supports various VMs and is also used to store ISO files.

I suppose my current challenge relates to my limited understanding of disk management practice within VMware and selecting the appropriate approach if any will support my desired use case.

Is it possible to present individual physical disks to more than one ESXi Host.

I appreciate that many have this working via Workstation installing in a Host OS (Win 2008 / 12 or even Win7) but I'm not sure if using ESXi as host for other nested ESXi VMs is plausible.

I was hoping to practice learning VUM to update some of the hosts & guests.

 

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You certainly can nest ESXi within ESXi its a very popular option along with the Workstation option. To present the storage what I would probably do is use Windows Server and install the iscsi target role. Then you can