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You are here: Home / How to Configure Nested ESXi 5 to Support EVC Clusters

How to Configure Nested ESXi 5 to Support EVC Clusters

02.10.2012 by William Lam // 10 Comments

Dave Hill recently wrote an article about running nested ESXi and a gotcha with EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility). In vSphere 4.x, you could not join a nested ESXi host into a cluster with EVC enabled. With vSphere 5, there's actually a way to connect a nested ESXi 5 host to an EVC enabled cluster AND still power on 64bit nested guestOSes.

I have to thank my friend and partner in crime Tuan Duong for showing me this trick awhile back. Tuan was performing some tests using both nested and physical ESXi 5 hosts and discovered this method after a bit of tinkering. At the time, I was not sure if others would find this useful and I did not document the process.

Disclaimer: As usual, this is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk. 

Here are the steps:

1. You must be running vSphere 5, create a nested ESXi 5 host using this article How to Enable Support for Nested 64bit & Hyper-V VMs in vSphere 5

2. Create an EVC enabled cluster or use an existing cluster with whatever baseline you would like and click on the "Current CPUID Details" in cluster settings.

3. Copy down the CPU mask flags for that particular EVC baseline, you will need this in the next step

4. Shutdown your nested ESXi 5 host and edit the VM's settings and under "Options" tab click on "CPUID Mask->Advanced". You will take the CPU mask from the above step and update the nested ESXi 5 VM to make it match

5. Go ahead and power on your nested ESXi 5 host and join it to the EVC enabled cluster you created earlier. You should not see any errors when connecting to the cluster and after that you can create a nested 64bit VM within that virtualized ESXi 5 host.

There you have it, running a nested ESXi 5 host and joined to an EVC enabled cluster! Isn't VMware technology awesome! 🙂

More from my site

  • How to Install VMware VSA with Running VMs
  • How to Install VMware VSA in Nested ESXi 5 Host Using the GUI
  • How to Enable Support for Nested 64bit & Hyper-V VMs in vSphere 5
  • Nested Virtualization Resources
  • The Missing Piece In Creating Your Own Ghetto vSEL Cloud

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // ESXi 5.0, evc, nested, vesxi, vSphere 5.0

Comments

  1. *protectedlongwhiteclouds.com says

    02/12/2012 at 2:27 am

    This is a great article. I just changed all my vESXi 5 systems that I use for vCD 1.5 over and enabled the Nehalem baseline. Worked a treat. Thanks so much for writing this William.

    Reply
  2. *protectedWilliam says

    02/12/2012 at 5:27 pm

    Michael, Glad the article was useful!

    Reply
  3. *protectedpattho says

    03/05/2012 at 12:03 am

    Was attempting this with EVC set to nehalem
    With a 55xx and 56xx

    I get an error....
    An unexpected error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM vm-2803.
    The processor does not support a required feature for this virtual machine. The virtual machine cannot be powered on.

    Used these settings

    Leaf 1 (used in Level 1 of CPU Id MASK)
    eax 0000:0000:0000:0001:0000:0110:1010:0100
    ebx
    ecx 0000:0000:1001:1000:1110:0010:0011:1101
    edx 1000:1111:1110:1011:1111:1011:1111:1111

    Leaf 80000001 (Used in level 8000001 of CPU ID mask)
    eax
    ebx
    ecx 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001
    edx 0010:1000:0001:0000:0000:1000:0000:0000

    Leaf d
    eax 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
    ebx
    ecx 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
    edx 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000

    Reply
  4. *protectedNiTRo says

    09/27/2012 at 12:34 pm

    Really usefull tip, thanks william

    Reply
  5. *protectedThe Foodinator says

    01/22/2013 at 1:25 am

    This might be obvious to some, but I struggled until I set my EVC mode to one architecture lower. I have Sandy Bridge Xeons that the web client says support Sandy Bridg EVC, but I had to select Westmere to get this to work.

    Reply
  6. *protectedlexone27 says

    05/09/2015 at 1:01 pm

    I was not able to get this to work - I have an Ivy Bridge CPU (i5-3750k). Is this supported with my CPU?

    Reply
  7. *protectedCarlos says

    06/27/2019 at 11:49 pm

    Hi William!
    Sorry for coming back to such an old post, but I'm trying to setup a nested ESXi 6.5 deployment with EVC clusters and would like to know if the info in this post also applies to 6.x, not only to ESXi 5.
    Could you confirm?
    Thank you!

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Nested Virtualization Resources | virtuallyGhetto says:
    12/15/2015 at 9:06 am

    […] How to Configure Nested ESXi 5 to Support EVC Clusters […]

    Reply
  2. vSphere 5.x から無停止で移行するには says:
    07/05/2019 at 11:08 pm

    […] また、このような移行を検証する場合、Nested ESXi での検証になる場合が多いが、EVC をNested のvSphere 5.x でテストする場合は、下記ブログのような操作が必要になるため注意。https://www.williamlam.com/2012/02/how-to-configure-nested-esxi-5-to.html […]

    Reply
  3. vSphere 5.x から無停止で移行するには – virtual pantry says:
    07/14/2019 at 1:37 am

    […] また、このような移行を検証する場合、Nested ESXi での検証になる場合が多いが、EVC をNested のvSphere 5.x でテストする場合は、下記ブログのような操作が必要になるため注意。https://www.williamlam.com/2012/02/how-to-configure-nested-esxi-5-to.html […]

    Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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