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You are here: Home / How to Install VMware VSA in Nested ESXi 5 Host Using the GUI

How to Install VMware VSA in Nested ESXi 5 Host Using the GUI

09.19.2011 by William Lam // 13 Comments

We upgraded the ghettoDatacenter to vSphere 5 this weekend and one of the things I wanted to play with was the new VMware VSA (vSphere Storage Appliance). Since we only have a single host, running nested ESXi would be our only option and this would allow us to easily deploy three vESXi 5.0 hosts and vCenter to tinker with the new VMware VSA.

UPDATE (09/16/12): You can use the same process outlined in this article to run the new VMware VSA 5.1 (vSphere Storage Appliance) in a nested ESXi configuration. Below is a screenshot of running VSA 5.1 in Nested ESXi 5.1.

One caveat in using vESXi hosts to test the VSA is during the selection of your ESXi hosts, VSA expects the hosts to be EVC capable. The VSA will create a vSphere Cluster and automatically enable EVC baseline based on your cpus. As you may or may not know, EVC can not be supported in a vESXi host and this would prevent you from selecting these hosts.

Luckily this issue was solved by a Vijay in his blog post here. There is a configuration file called dev.properties located in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\VSAManager\WEB-INF\classes which contains a line specifying whether or not EVC should be configured "evc.config". This configuration file appears to be used by VMware internally for some type of development but by changing the parameter from true to false, the VSA will support non-EVC capable hosts and not enable EVC for the VSA vSphere cluster.

Note: This is most likely not supported by VMware, please use at your own risk along with modifying any other values within this file.

Now, you might wonder if Vijay had already documented this process in his blog, why am I repeating it? Well the issue that Vijay had identified by tweaking this configuration file was that the VSA GUI installer did not detect the change and had to rely on an alternative method of installation using the commandline. Though not ideal, this method does work but for first time evaluators of the VMware VSA, the various commandline options can overwhelm or confuse users. It would be great if one could using the VSA GUI to perform the installation which is much more intuitive and that is reason for this article.

For the VSA to detect the new changes, you will need to restart the VMware VSA and then the vCenter Service under the Windows Services utility. I am not sure why both services need to be restarted, but I guess the VSA extension is not updated when just the VSA is restarted which is unfortunate. 

Once both services have started up, open a new vSphere Client session to your vCenter Server and proceed with the VSA installation. During the selection of the hosts, you will now have the option of selecting your vESXi 5 hosts and a warning message is presented stating "Unsupported Hardware" but the installer will allow you to continue on. 

After you have selected either two or three of your vESXi hosts, you will be prompted once more that this configuration is not supported nor in the VMware HCL, go ahead and click OK.

After this, you will be able to go through the rest of the VSA installation as long as meet the default requirements of the VMware VSA noted in the documentation.

So if you have some interests in the new VMware VSA and do not have physical hardware to test with, you should consider deploying a couple of vESXi hosts and kick the tires with the new VSA.

More from my site

  • How to Install VMware VSA with Running VMs
  • How to Configure Nested ESXi 5 to Support EVC Clusters
  • The Missing Piece In Creating Your Own Ghetto vSEL Cloud
  • How to Enable Support for Nested 64bit & Hyper-V VMs in vSphere 5
  • w00t! VMware Tools for Nested ESXi!

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // esxi5, evc, nested, vsa, vSphere 5.0

Comments

  1. Ram says

    09/19/2011 at 12:09 pm

    Excellent post. Will try on physical PE 1950 by creating 2 vesxi - 4 nics and continue with this guide for VSA install. Thanks!

    Reply
  2. jitla says

    10/10/2011 at 5:32 pm

    hi

    i am stuck at the "select hosts to add to vsa cluster" screen.
    i have made the required changed to the dev file.
    my issue is, i cannot tick my hosts, no matter what i try i cant get a tick in th boxes to select my hosts.
    am i doing something wrong??
    can anyone advise?

    Reply
  3. Mike D. says

    04/21/2012 at 3:41 am

    Good Stuff. I'llgive it a shot this wkend.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous says

    07/09/2012 at 9:39 pm

    All my hosts are EVC enabled but using VSA is not possible: "Unsupported Hardware - should not be in a cluster". Behaviour is same-same if I set the parameter to false in dev.properties.

    How can I get 'round that?

    Reply
  5. Anonymous says

    08/03/2012 at 6:36 pm

    Worked amazing, fantastic post. Saved me from having to test this on my new physical hardware.
    thanks

    Reply
  6. The Foodinator says

    01/20/2013 at 6:43 pm

    Does anyone know if there is an evaluation key option for VSA? I would really like to try this.

    Reply
  7. The Foodinator says

    01/20/2013 at 9:29 pm

    Also, how did you meet the hardware requirements for a RAID controller and RAID set?

    Reply
    • Rob says

      02/28/2013 at 10:01 pm

      1) VSA is part of the vSphere 5.1 60-day evaluation.
      2) The RAID requirement was not a hard stop. My outer-guest ESXi servers are each set with a single 325 GB SCSI VHD. The VSA Manager didn't complain about them during configuration. I'm running the three ESXi servers and the vCenter servers under a VMware Workstation 8 system.

      I did have to reboot instead of just restarting services after setting evc.config to false.

      Reply
  8. dooby says

    04/20/2013 at 11:10 am

    very useful, thank you

    Reply
  9. Emilian Wiznerowicz says

    06/21/2013 at 12:12 pm

    I have a problem: I've added HDD (second Hdd, first is 3GB) (bigger than 30GB) to nested ESX. VSA Installer is showing message: Unsupported Hardware (available storage is less than 30GB...).

    Even if I add this HDD as a Storage to ESX still the same message.

    Can you advise?

    Emil

    Reply
    • My Life says

      11/16/2013 at 5:02 am

      You may have other shared datastore mounted. VSA can only be installed on ESXi just with local datastore

      Reply
  10. Shyamsundar T says

    04/23/2016 at 8:14 am

    You saved my day.

    Reply
  11. rocky sheddy says

    11/04/2017 at 9:37 pm

    Please create step by step screen capture for installation of VSA in VMware Workstation. Also, please provide us the details of the VMware Workstation networking (Bridge, NAT, Host only) to be created to make VSA configuration complete.

    Reply

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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