I know many of our internal teams (field, engineering, support, etc.), customers and partners have heavily relied on my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances (VA) over the years which makes it seamless to deploy both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) lab environments for learning, testing, troubleshooting, automation and development purposes. To support our customers in troubleshooting and prototyping purposes, I also make use of my Nested ESXi VAs on a regular basis and have found this to be invaluable in aiding my day to day work.
As part of the VMware by Broadcom "Day 2" transition, the hosting platform that housed my Nested ESXi downloads was no longer available and that impacted both the standalone Nested ESXi downloads but also the Nested ESXi Content Library, which provided a convenient way to subscribe to all the VAs from your vCenter Server.
Today, I excited to share that my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance downloads are back and they are now available under the VMware Flings program! 🥳
Nested ESXi Standalone Downloads
Register for a free Broadcom Community account and then head over to the VMware Flings Community, accept the license agreement and you will see the list of downloads at the very top as shown in the screenshot below.
Nested ESXi Content Library
Unfortunately, the Nested ESXi Content Library will no longer be available but if you wish to have something similar within your own environment, you can create your own Nested ESXi Content Library by following this blog post HERE.
“…Unfortunately, the Nested ESXi Content Library will no longer be available but…”
Why are Broadcom so set on destroying every decent thing VMware did for the community.
And also doing it in such a way that when they are sick of their play toy will be hard for someone to “rehydrate” it.
I attempted to leverage these appliances and when trying to import then I get an error about missing disks. Do these need to be generated or are the zip's missing them?
You need to unzip to get to consumable OVA
I'm seeing the same issue. Looking inside the OVA, the manifest shows 3 disks, however only disk 1 is present
Which version are you trying?
I tried three 8.0 versions and saw the same issue. 8.0 Update 2b, 8.0 Update 2 and 8.0 Update 1d
Please try again with the newer 8.x, I've re-uploaded them
ESXi 8.0 Update 2 VA
ESXi 8.0 Update 2b VA
still report missing disks 2/3
Same issue here for me
Hello! I'm getting "Selected OVA file is not a valid template." trying to import a 7.x appliance into a 7.3p vCenter as well. I've tried 3 or 4 different 7.x versions.
FYI 7.3m is the newest version that can be imported... (tried o-m)
I can confirm that few of the 8.x aren't extracting properly, they may had issues uploading. Let me remove them later today and re-upload, apologies
Please try again with the newer 8.x, I've re-uploaded them
Hi, getting the following error:
2 required file(s) missing: browse again and use multiple selection to reselect the OVF template and all required files. If you are trying to import a .ova file then it may be missing file(s). Missing file(s) : Nested_ESXi8.0u2b_Appliance_Template_v1-disk2.vmdk, Nested_ESXi8.0u2b_Appliance_Template_v1-disk3.vmdk
It looks like 8.0u1a is the latest version that works. The newer ones appear to be missing disks.
Please try again with the newer 8.x, I've re-uploaded them
Please try again with the newer 8.x, I've re-uploaded them
I get same error for 8.0U2. 7.x U3L worked fine.
Is it possible you had cache version, should be good now as I had others confirm
Just tried downloading the ESXi 8.0 Update 2b VA and I'm seeing the same issue with the missing disks. Maybe there is a webserver caching issue or maybe the files where rolled back over the weekend?
Do other 7.x or 8.x work, is it just 80u2b that has issues
I just tried from another system and 80u2b downloads fine, so wondering if Cloudflare is somehow caching within your location
Hi All,
Anyone else facing this problem of pre-deployment vales added to the OVA do get inserted into the deployed Nested ESXi ?
I have tried different versions, does not seem to work in any of the versions.
Thank you and y'all who pushed Broadcom to provide Flings!!