WilliamLam.com

  • About
    • About
    • Privacy
  • VMware Cloud
  • Tanzu
    • Application Modernization
    • Tanzu services
    • Tanzu Community Edition
    • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
    • vSphere with Tanzu
  • Home Lab
  • Nested Virtualization
  • Apple
You are here: Home / ESXi / VMware Tools is now pre-installed with Nested ESXi 6.0

VMware Tools is now pre-installed with Nested ESXi 6.0

02.26.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

I just came across this super awesome little tidbit from Core Nested ESXi Engineer Jim Mattson, that ESXi 6.0 now comes per-installed with VMware Tools when running Nested ESXi. This means you no longer have to manually install the VMware Tools for Nested ESXi but ESXi will be able to automatically detect that it is running inside of a VM and automatically startup the vmtoolsd process.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

Screen Shot 2015-02-26 at 9.25.12 AM
This new feature of Nested ESXi is agnostic to the underlying physical ESXi version as well as the virtual hardware version. The only requirement is that the Nested ESXi is running ESXi 6.0. Talk about ease of use, this just made Nested ESXi that much cooler as if it was not already! 🙂

If you need to directly call into the vmtoolsd process for extracting OVF properties/etc. make sure you have correct library paths setup before running the vmtoolsd command, else you will get an error. To do so, run the following two commands:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/vmware/vmtools/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=/usr/lib/vmware/vmtools/bin:$PATH

More from my site

  • Quick Tip - Upgrading VMware Tools for Nested ESXi 6.0
  • Using PowerCLI to invoke Guest Operations API to a Nested ESXi VM
  • Subscribe to vGhetto Nested ESXi Template Content Library in vSphere 6.0
  • How to configure SMP-FT using Nested ESXi in vSphere 6?
  • w00t! VMware Tools for Nested ESXi!

Categories // ESXi, Nested Virtualization, vSphere 6.0 Tags // nested virtualization, vmware tools, vSphere 6.0

Comments

  1. Tom Miller says

    02/27/2015 at 1:08 pm

    Nice. How about the shim driver for the networking?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      02/27/2015 at 3:22 pm

      If you're referring to the Mac Learning dvFilter, that is a VIB that's installed on the "physical" ESXi host and then Advanced VM Settings must be added, so no it does not include that as it is completely different.

      Reply
  2. tmackay2013 says

    02/28/2015 at 12:09 pm

    But we still do not officially have GSS support on nested correct?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      02/28/2015 at 4:11 pm

      Correct, Nested ESXi is not officially supported

      Reply
  3. JohnW says

    03/02/2015 at 3:08 pm

    Does the MAC Learning dvFilter still work on ESXi 6.0?

    Reply
  4. james says

    08/07/2015 at 7:49 pm

    Hey gurus,

    I have a box with CPU VT Virtualization enabled on, installed ESXI 6 + VCSA 6 and trying to nested ESX5.5. I have installed Windows 7 64 (ESX 5.5) bit and I cannot make it boot, in fact any other 64bit instances within the ESX 5.5.
    secondly, I had installed within the VCSA 6 Windows 2012 Datacenter and I tried to boot an Windows 7 64bit within the HyperV 2012 instance and it cannot boot. So what I’m missing ?
    I followed the article http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/08/how-to-enable-nested-esxi-other.html
    http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/07/how-to-enable-support-for-nested-64bit.html
    but it didn’t help

    any ideas?

    Reply
  5. james says

    08/07/2015 at 8:19 pm

    Well I found out for windows 2012 server but now i will try the ESXi5.5

    ESXi 6.0

    Virtualized HV is fully supported for virtual hardware version 9 or later VMs on hosts that support Intel VT-x and EPT or AMD-V and RVI. To enable virtualized HV, use the web client and navigate to the processor settings screen. Check the box next to "Expose hardware-assisted virtualization to the guest operating system." This setting is not available under the traditional C# client.

    Reply
  6. Stuart Connelly says

    01/07/2016 at 7:30 am

    I am currently studying for my VMware VCP 6 DCV and I was told on the course that you can download an ESX ISO into VMware workstation. Apparently there is a site to download these from including the vCentre Appliance. The environment will go on to my Win10 desktop. I was wondering if you might be able to help.

    Reply
  7. Larry says

    02/02/2016 at 5:48 am

    Hi Will, and anyone else who's interested,

    Is there any way to nest vSGA without using vDGA to pass-through a whole card to the nested ESXi instance? I'm thinking, a native ESXi driver for the SVGA adapter in the nested instance to provide Xorg with OpenGL/Mesa acceleration in the same way an Nvidia/AMD/Intel driver does on the host.

    Such a driver already exists for Linux so this can't be too difficult. A possible snag would come in providing a secondary adapter for the vmkernel to use for DCUI in the nested instance. In fact maybe this already works, but lack of a secondary adapter is the problem.

    What do you think?

    Thanks,

    Larry

    Reply

Thanks for the comment! Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Search

Author

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)

Connect

  • Email
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Recent

  • How to enable passthrough for USB Network Adapters claimed by ESXi CDCE Driver? 03/30/2023
  • Self-Contained & Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment using new VLC Holodeck Toolkit 03/29/2023
  • ESXi configstorecli enhancement in vSphere 8.0 Update 1 03/28/2023
  • ESXi on Intel NUC 13 Pro (Arena Canyon) 03/27/2023
  • Quick Tip - Enabling ESXi Coredumps to be stored on USB 03/26/2023

Advertisment

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Copyright WilliamLam.com © 2023

 

Loading Comments...