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You are here: Home / Uncategorized / How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vCloud Director 5.1

How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vCloud Director 5.1

08.29.2012 by William Lam // 5 Comments

The process to enable  "Nested Virtualization" in the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1 and create your own virtual lab similar to VMware's vSEL (Virtual Sales Enablement Cloud) is very similar to the previous steps outlined for vCloud Director 1.5 release. The only change is how VHV (Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization) aka "Nested Virtualization" is enabled in vCloud Director 5.1 and ESXi 5.1.

In the vCloud Director 1.5, to enable VHV, you needed to add a special SQL statement that would enable VHV for the underlying ESXi 5.0 hosts. With the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1, that is no longer necessary and you now enable it on a Per VM basis within the vCloud Director 5.1 UI.

Here are the steps for enabling VHV for vCloud Director 5.1

  • Insert SQL statements into VCD Database that perform the following:
    • Enable new "VMware" guestOS Family
    • Enable new guestOS Type ESXi 4.x and 5.x
    • Enable host preparation to enable VHV (vSphere 5.0 & vCloud 1.5 only)
  • Enable promiscuous mode
    • Insert SQL statement into VCD Database for Network Pool that is being used for your ESXi VMs
    • Enable both Promiscuous Mode and Forged Transmit for vSphere Backed Portgroup within vCenter Server or ESXi host

The SQL statements can be found in this article and have not changed for vCloud Director 5.1

Here is a screenshot of what you should see in the vCloud Director 5.1 UI for creating a new VM and you should now have the ability to select a new guestOS Type called "VMware" and select either an ESXi 4.x or ESXi 5.x guestOS Version.

To enable VHV for the VM, you will need to also check the box "Exposed hardware-assisted CPU virtualization to guestOS" and this will allow you to run a nested ESXi VM as well as 64-bit nested VMs, assuming your physical CPUs support it. To learn more about running VHV on ESXi 5.1, take a look at this article here for more details.

More from my site

  • Having Difficulties Enabling Nested ESXi in vSphere 5.1?
  • Nested Virtualization APIs For vSphere & vCloud Director 5.1
  • How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vSphere 5.1
  • Nested Virtualization Resources
  • How To Enable Nested ESXi Using VXLAN In vSphere & vCloud Director

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // ESXi 5.1, hyper-v, nested, vcloud director 5.1, vesxi, vhv, vsel, vSphere 5.1

Comments

  1. *protectedAnonymous says

    12/06/2012 at 5:50 pm

    Be careful with EVC enabled on the physical cluster. I had a problems after setting up Merom Gen in EVC, I couldn't start nested ESXi with "Expose hardware..." option enabled. After disabling EVC everything worked as it should

    Reply
  2. *protectedDasNing says

    05/22/2013 at 10:14 am

    Looks like with vCD 5.1 there are only 3 guest_family types (as with vSphere). I have used the following SQL statements to add the new guest OS types:

    INSERT INTO guest_os_type (display_name, internal_name, family_id, is_supported, is_64bit, min_disk_gb, min_memory_mb, min_hw_version, supports_cpu_hotadd, supports_mem_hotadd, diskadapter_id, max_cpu_supported, is_personalization_enabled, is_personalization_auto, is_sysprep_supported, is_sysprep_os_packaged, cim_id, cim_version) VALUES ('VMware ESX 4.x', 'vmkernelGuest', 3, 1, 1, 8, 3072, 7,1, 1, 4, 8, 0, 0, 0, 0, 107, 40);
    INSERT INTO guest_os_type (display_name, internal_name, family_id, is_supported, is_64bit, min_disk_gb, min_memory_mb, min_hw_version, supports_cpu_hotadd, supports_mem_hotadd, diskadapter_id, max_cpu_supported, is_personalization_enabled, is_personalization_auto, is_sysprep_supported, is_sysprep_os_packaged, cim_id, cim_version) VALUES ('VMware ESXi 5.x', 'vmkernel5Guest', 3, 1, 1, 8, 3072, 7,1, 1, 4, 8, 0, 0, 0, 0, 107, 50);

    Note these are for SQL server, with Oracle you'll need to add the guestos_id fields.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Nested ESXi on vCloud Air - Links - DavidHill.co says:
    05/28/2015 at 3:34 pm

    […] How to Enable Nested ESXi & other Hypervisors in vCloud Director […]

    Reply
  2. How To Enable Nested ESXi Using VXLAN In vSphere & vCloud Director | virtuallyGhetto says:
    07/28/2015 at 1:49 pm

    […] Note: VXLAN is only supported in vCloud Director 5.1, for previous versions you have the choice of using a VCD-NI or vSphere backed network and the configurations for that can be found here. […]

    Reply
  3. Nested Virtualization Resources | virtuallyGhetto says:
    12/15/2015 at 9:07 am

    […] How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vCloud Director 5.1 […]

    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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