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.
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
Nice. How about the shim driver for the networking?
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.
But we still do not officially have GSS support on nested correct?
Correct, Nested ESXi is not officially supported
Does the MAC Learning dvFilter still work on ESXi 6.0?
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?
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.
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.
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