I have written a number of articles about VMware Nested Virtualization and even today, I am still surprised at how easy it is to virtualize not only our own hypervisor but other vendor's hypervisors as well. This week I received an interesting question from my old Technical Marketing colleague Rawlinson Rivera who wanted to run a nested RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) Hypervisor on ESXi. This was not something I had done before nor had any interest in doing and I told Rawlinson that it should technically work as long as the guestOS is enabled with VHV.
Rawlinson's attempt at installing RHEV resulted in the VM hanging after boot up. After a bit of research, it turns out some additional tweaks are required to get RHEV running on ESXi. I would like to give a huge thanks to Jim Mattson, one of the VMware developers who help made Nested Virtualization possible, for his assistance.
Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Please use at your own risk.
Here are the instructions on creating a virtual machine that can be used to install RHEV (make sure you follow these exact steps, the VM must be created with these settings or it will not work):
Step 1 - Download RHEV 6.3 or 6.4 from Red Hat's website
Step 2 - Create a new Virtual Machine (vHW9) and when you get to the OS selection, you will need to select the following:
Guest Family - Other
Guest Version - Other (64-bit)
awesome 🙂 love it
Very good article. I could install it smoothly by following these steps.
But when I try to use DHCP to assign ip to this VM, it says DHCP failed.
Any idea?
Thanks for article.
same problem here, could not ping the host even assign ip manually to the vm
Excellent article. You saved me from my frustrations, kudos!
Hi william
As you specifically mention vHW9 - can we take it that this procedure requires a minimum of eSxi 5.1 or higher ?