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You are here: Home / Uncategorized / Nested ESXi 5.1 Supports VMXNET3 Network Adapter Type

Nested ESXi 5.1 Supports VMXNET3 Network Adapter Type

09.11.2012 by William Lam // 15 Comments

I noticed something interesting while extracting the contents of ESXi 5.1 ISO for some kickstart configurations ....

Do you see it? It's a VMXNET3 driver for the VMkernel! I also confirmed by running the following ESXCLI command querying for the VMkernel module "vmxnet3":

# esxcli system module get -m vmxnet3
Module: vmxnet3
Module File: /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/vmxnet3
License: GPL
Version: Version 1.1.32.0, Build: 799733, Interface: 9.2 Built on: Aug  1 2012
Signed Status:
Signature Issuer:
Signature Digest:
Signature FingerPrint:
Provided Namespaces:
Required Namespaces: [email protected], [email protected]_1_0_0

***Disclaimer***: This is for educational purposes only, this is not officially supported by VMware. Use at your own risk. There is also a mention of this in the vSphere 5.1 release notes that VMs running on nested ESXi hosts using VMXNET3 driver could potentially crash. Again, not supported user at your own risk.

Next I decided to create a Nested ESXi 5.1 VM, but instead of selecting the e1000 driver which was the only network adapter type that would function for running a nested ESXi host, I choose the VMXNET3 adapter and to my surprise ESXi's networking stack was fully functional.

You can see from the above screenshot, I have a two VMXNET3 network adapters for my nested ESXi 5.1 VM. Here are two additional screenshot of the physical adapters as seen by nested ESXi 5.1 host and you can see that it shows up as VMware Inc. VMXNET3

I have not tried any performance tests, so not sure if there are going to be any significant benefits but pretty cool nonetheless!

More from my site

  • Nested Virtualization APIs For vSphere & vCloud Director 5.1
  • Having Difficulties Enabling Nested ESXi in vSphere 5.1?
  • How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vCloud Director 5.1
  • How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vSphere 5.1
  • w00t! VMware Tools for Nested ESXi!

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // esxi5.1, nested, vesxi, vmxnet3, vSphere 5.1

Comments

  1. Anonymous says

    09/27/2012 at 3:10 pm

    Have you experienced the second nic on a nested ESXi5.1 having no networking connectivity? In my lab I was building out nested vSphere, on a vDS I have nic1 on management and nic2 as the vMotion vmk port. For some reason that nic will not have network connectivity. I built an Ubuntu box and put the nics on the same networks and have no issues, it seems only to be ESXi5.1 with the issue.

    Reply
  2. Chris J says

    10/29/2012 at 4:08 pm

    Hello, have you enabled Promiscuous mode on the vDS PortGroup?

    Thanks,

    Christian Johnston

    Reply
  3. The Foodinator says

    01/18/2013 at 1:20 pm

    How did you get the vmxnet3 adapters to show up in the selection menu?

    Reply
  4. Frantisek Ferencik says

    02/04/2013 at 2:24 pm

    Hi,
    my experience:
    First I have created Linux Red Hat 6 64bit with 4 vmxnet3 adapters. Then switched to ESX5 OS in Edit Settings. Converted to Template then deployed VM ESXi from it. Deployment Wizard showed me that vmxnet3 network devices are not supported for this configuration of nested ESXi VM. Then I started new nested ESXi VM reset ESXi management network of that nested ESXi to regenerate its vmk0 especially because of MAC address conflict with other nested ESXis. Then enabled vmkernel port of it nested ESXi VM for vMotion and PSOD!!!!
    So looks like you can create and start nested ESXi VM with vmxnet3 network adapter but not working after you modify vmkernel network settings.

    Reply
  5. Marco Broeken says

    02/17/2013 at 7:33 pm

    I had spend all day testing the vESX with all kinds of different configurations.

    Seems that every time when traffic flows over the VMXNET3 enabled port, ESXi does PSOD.

    Tried to config with management ports on E1000 and only NFS configured with VMXNET3. this seemed to work for a while (couple of minutes) but again PSOD>

    It would be very helpfull to have 10G NFS interfaces in my vESX hosts in my lab. Can't seem to get it working properly 🙁

    Reply
  6. vcdxorbust.com says

    06/07/2013 at 3:57 pm

    Thanks Will - You helped me fix a problem I was having with nested ESXi dropping packets http://vcdxorbust.com/2013/06/07/how-to-fix-packet-drops-on-nested-esxi/ Much appreciated!

    Reply
  7. Anonymous says

    06/20/2013 at 1:10 am

    HI Guys, If any one of you found a fix for the PSOD issue because of vmnet3, please reply.

    Philip

    Reply
  8. Justin says

    09/25/2014 at 2:44 pm

    Will,

    In my nested ESXi 5.5 environment I noticed an issue. I created my nested ESXi vm using the "Other 64-bit" OS type during creation along with 2 VMXNET3 NICs and then switched it to VMware ESXi 5.x after it was built. I went to add an additional network card and my only selection for the new NIC was was E1000 or E1000e.

    Changing the OS type back to "Other" allows me to add the VMXNET3 adapter.

    Not sure if it matters, but I also have the VM Tools fling install in the nested ESXi host.

    Any insight on this behavior?

    Reply
  9. Jason says

    02/16/2015 at 11:02 pm

    This unfortunately does not work for me anymore with 5.5u2. I can still set the guesOS to vmkernel5, but then I can only choose e1000 or e1000e as NIC driver. When I try to manually set it in the VMX file I get the message that this OS does not support that type of NIC driver.

    Well, for nested ESXi the "performance" should be enough. But I would have loved to play with it a little more :).

    Reply
  10. Prasad says

    11/07/2015 at 8:13 am

    Hi
    I am trying to create Virtual ESXi on Dell T320 with One vmnic. I am getting "No network Adapter found" error while Powering up the ESXi VM. I have Promiscous mode set to accept. Please help with this issue. Thanks in Advance.

    Reply
    • Prasad says

      11/07/2015 at 8:15 am

      Sorry Forgot to mention it is ESXi 6.0

      Reply
      • William Lam says

        11/07/2015 at 4:58 pm

        How much memory did you configure the Virtual ESXi VM? You need to ensure you have at least 5GB or more configured as that's the minimum to install ESXi 6.0, else you'll see some strange errors like the ones you've mentioned as the minimum amount of memory has not been allocated

        Reply
        • Prasad says

          11/08/2015 at 2:56 pm

          Hi William,

          Thanks for the reply. I changed Memory from 2GB to 5GB and it worked fine. Did not get the error again. Thanks!!!!! once again for your advise.

          Reply

Trackbacks

  1. vSphere 2015 : VMFS on USB - Hypervisor.fr says:
    03/29/2015 at 8:38 pm

    […] le post de William qui décrit comment utiliser des clefs USB (et du iSCSI) avec VSAN 6. Entre ça, le support des VMXNET3, les vmtools pour ESXi, le fling Mac Learning dvFilter, le support du Virtual Hardware-Assisted […]

    Reply
  2. Configure NSX-T Enhanced Data path / Network Stack (ENS) for Nested ESXi says:
    12/10/2019 at 9:42 am

    […] 0 (Optional) - Before prepping your Nested ESXi VMs in NSX-T, we can confirm that the standard nvmxnet3 (Native Driver for VMXNET3) is currently loaded. To do so, simply SSH to the Nested ESXi VM and run esxcfg-nics -e which will […]

    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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