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Has anyone heard any announcements from vmware as to when these will be officially supported? Their website is a bit of a mess. I'm wondering if ESXi 3.5 will support them or ESXi4 ?

Googling around only provides info about installing the RC version of windows 7, we already have the release version from our MAPS subscription.

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  • Is this a limitation of ESXi? We've got dozens of 2008 servers (and a few Windows 7 RTM guests) running on ESX clusters...
    – Izzy
    Oct 8, 2009 at 15:24
  • "Running" and "officially supported" are 2 different species. In some shops "it's supported" is the way to go... "it works" isn't good enough.
    – ThatGraemeGuy
    Oct 8, 2009 at 15:50
  • A 2008 server isn't the same as a 2008 R2 server as they've used the Windows 7 kernel I believe.
    – Mark Henderson
    Oct 8, 2009 at 20:35

4 Answers 4

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They are both officially supported in ESX4 Update 1:

http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx40_u1_rel_notes.html

They are also both officially supported in ESX 3.5 Update 5:

http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_esx35u5_rel_notes.html

You can install 2008 R2 on an ESX4 RTM host, as long as you do a custom tools installation and don't install the SVGA driver or the Shared Folders driver since both have compatibility issues. These issues have been fixed in u1 and u5 for 4 and 3.5 respectively.

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Windows 7 is supported under ESX 4 windows 2008 up to sp2 is supported under ESX 3.5U4 and 4

you can search here - Select the Guest/Host tab - for supported guest operating Systems.

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Windows 7 is "Experimental" for vSphere. Windows 2008 R2 will probably be supported in the next minor release. They are usually pretty tight lipped about stuff until it comes out.

I wouldn't expect to much official support in ESX 3.5.

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I have installed both with success in ESXi 4.0.

This being said there are a few rough edges that gan throw you in a spin if you are not carefull :

  • make sure your hardware can load 64 bits properly (although with ESXi this should not be problematic) especially that the VT tech is activated.
  • The default video driver only allotted 4 m of video RAM for these systems. Windows did not enjoy that much.
  • there are some options in the VMTools that are not working, things like disable copy-paste etc, I did not try them all.

I see that it seems fully supported in ESXi 4.01, maybe I should give the update a run see if it fixed some of these issues.

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