I have received several questions about this in the last couple of weeks regarding the process of upgrading VMware Tools for running Nested ESXi 5.x and 6.0 when the physical ESXi host has been upgraded to ESXi 6.0. Instead of individual replies, I thought I would share this quick tip. First off, VMware Tools for Nested ESXi provides a very specific set of capabilities for Nested ESXi guests as shown below:
- Provides guest OS information of the nested ESXi Hypervisor (eg. IP address, configured hostname, etc.).
- Allows the nested ESXi VM to be cleanly shut down or restarted when performing power operations with the vSphere Web/C# Client or vSphere APIs.
- Executes scripts that help automate ESXi guest OS operations when the guest’s power state changes.
- Supports the Guest Operations API (formally known as the VIX API).
Unlike traditional VMware Tools which may provide updated capabilities with each new release, VMware Tools for Nested ESXi exposes only a subset of those capabilities which has not changed between ESXi 5.x and 6.0. This is an important fact to be aware of because you may see "Unsupported older version" for the VMware Tools status in the vSphere Web/C# Client and this is perfectly fine and expected.
Here is a screenshot of a Nested ESXi 5.5 VM with VMware Tools installed running on top of an upgraded physical ESXi 6.0 host:
In this scenario, the VMware Tools status will be reported as "Unsupported older version" because the version of VMware Tools does not match the latest version of VMware Tools included with ESXi 6.0. However, you should not be alarm as the expected functionality listed above will continue to work without any problems and you can just ignore the UI warning. The only way to get rid of this warning is to upgrade the Nested ESXi VM to ESXi 6.0 which I go over in more details below. I know upgrading may not be an option if you still wish to run ESXi 5.x, but as far as I know, there will not be an update to VMware Tools VIB for ESXi 6.0 as it is now pre-installed with ESXi 6.0.
Here is a screenshot of the same VM which has now been upgraded to ESXi 6.0 running on top of an upgraded physical ESXi 6.0 host:
In this case, the VMware Tools status will be reported as "Unsupported older version" because the version of VMware Tools does not match the latest version of VMware Tools included with ESXi 6.0. However, because VMware Tools now comes pre-installed with ESXi 6.0. We can easily remedy this by removing the VMware Tools VIB we installed for ESXi 5.x by running the following ESXCLI command and then rebooting:
esxcli software vib remove -n esx-tools-for-esxi
Once the ESXi host has rebooted, the VMware Tools that is pre-installed with ESXi 6.0 will automatically start up if it detects it is running as a VM. If you now look at your vSphere Web/C# Client, you will see that VMware Tools status shows current and is also the default behavior if you are running Nested ESXi 6.0 VM on top of physical ESXi 6.0 host.
With VMware Tools being pre-installed with ESXi 6.0 and only loaded when it detects it is being run as a VM, you no longer need to worry about manually installing additional VIBs get the benefits of having VMware Tools installed for your Nested ESXi VMs.
What kind of performance hit do you see from nested virtualization. I only ask because I have a bit of an elaborate setup right now. I run 4 VM's one of which provides iSCSI for the other 3 VMs. So in order to do this I have FreeNAS SSH into the ESXi host after iSCSI is available and tells the host to rescan the iSCSI datastore. I paired that with a startup/shutdown delay and it seems to work just fine. I'm questioning if maybe I should just do nested virtualization so that iSCSI is only for the second layer of ESXI.
BTW, thanks for all the awesome work.
It the nested ESXi 7.0 also pre-installed with vmware tools? Can I get the vmware tools VIB package for ESXi 7.0?