Virtualization for Newbies

you have the right idea but in somewhat the wrong order.  your best option is to put windows or linux on the laptop and then use virtualbox or Vmware workstation to create the hypervisor.   then you will install linux in the vm space (or windows) you can also install ESXi and learn that platform as well if you use VMWare workstation as the hypervisor.

You cannot easily run ESXi on a laptop it needs bare metal.

Does your laptop have WIndows 10 ?

esxi on a laptop is plain crazy.

i would recommend virtualbox for such cases. you can install it on either windows or linux. the gui is rather straightforwards.

if the laptop runs linux, you can also consider kvm with virtio which produces close to barebone speeds in many cases.

ESXI CAN be run inside a VM if you are studying for your VMWare certs.  if you are just trying to learn it, this is a great way to go (I do it myself). however for day to day usage, others are correct in that there are better ways to go than trying to shoehorn ESXI onto a laptop.

Hi Everyone:
I'm running Windows 10 Pro on my laptop.

I purchased a laptop and would like to set up a couple virtual machines. Never did this before.  But ESXI is what I hear is the platform I should use. is this true?

That depends VMware vSphere is one of the Industry Commercial Standards use by Industry and Corporates. But so is Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, Oracle, AWS, Azure etc


Add the Hyper-V role, and create some virtual machines, UNLESS you really want to start learning VMware vSphere (ESXi) ?

if you really want to learn the latter ONLY< then I've written many many EE Articles for VMware vSphere Novices.

let me know. You do not need to add any third party software using Windows 10 Pro.