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You are here: Home / ESXi / Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances are now back under VMware Flings Community!

Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances are now back under VMware Flings Community!

05.15.2024 by William Lam // 25 Comments

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.

More from my site

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Categories // ESXi, Nested Virtualization Tags // Nested ESXi

Comments

  1. *protectedPinPinPoola says

    05/15/2024 at 11:52 am

    “…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.

    Reply
    • *protectedJason says

      05/16/2024 at 12:00 am

      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.

      Reply
  2. *protectedAnon says

    05/16/2024 at 7:18 am

    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?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      05/16/2024 at 9:16 am

      You need to unzip to get to consumable OVA

      Reply
      • *protectedAndrew says

        05/16/2024 at 10:02 am

        I'm seeing the same issue. Looking inside the OVA, the manifest shows 3 disks, however only disk 1 is present

        Reply
        • William Lam says

          05/16/2024 at 10:13 am

          Which version are you trying?

          Reply
          • *protectedAndrew says

            05/16/2024 at 10:20 am

            I tried three 8.0 versions and saw the same issue. 8.0 Update 2b, 8.0 Update 2 and 8.0 Update 1d

    • William Lam says

      05/17/2024 at 5:49 am

      Please try again with the newer 8.x, I've re-uploaded them

      Reply
      • *protectedNick says

        05/20/2024 at 7:18 pm

        ESXi 8.0 Update 2 VA
        ESXi 8.0 Update 2b VA

        still report missing disks 2/3

        Reply
      • *protectedJul says

        05/22/2024 at 4:01 am

        Same issue here for me

        Reply
  3. *protectedRich Liberty says

    05/16/2024 at 10:18 am

    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.

    Reply
    • *protectedRich Liberty says

      05/16/2024 at 10:59 am

      FYI 7.3m is the newest version that can be imported... (tried o-m)

      Reply
      • William Lam says

        05/16/2024 at 11:42 am

        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

        Reply
      • William Lam says

        05/17/2024 at 5:47 am

        Please try again with the newer 8.x, I've re-uploaded them

        Reply
  4. *protectedKent Winsor says

    05/16/2024 at 1:28 pm

    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

    Reply
    • *protectedAndrew says

      05/17/2024 at 5:36 am

      It looks like 8.0u1a is the latest version that works. The newer ones appear to be missing disks.

      Reply
      • William Lam says

        05/17/2024 at 5:46 am

        Please try again with the newer 8.x, I've re-uploaded them

        Reply
    • William Lam says

      05/17/2024 at 5:46 am

      Please try again with the newer 8.x, I've re-uploaded them

      Reply
      • *protectedKent Winsor says

        05/17/2024 at 7:39 am

        I get same error for 8.0U2. 7.x U3L worked fine.

        Reply
        • William Lam says

          05/17/2024 at 11:46 am

          Is it possible you had cache version, should be good now as I had others confirm

          Reply
          • *protectedLT says

            05/20/2024 at 8:06 am

            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?

          • William Lam says

            05/20/2024 at 9:05 am

            Do other 7.x or 8.x work, is it just 80u2b that has issues

          • William Lam says

            05/20/2024 at 10:53 am

            I just tried from another system and 80u2b downloads fine, so wondering if Cloudflare is somehow caching within your location

  5. *protectedtryllz says

    05/19/2024 at 1:45 pm

    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.

    Reply
  6. *protectedHoss says

    07/11/2024 at 1:22 pm

    Thank you and y'all who pushed Broadcom to provide Flings!!

    Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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