The NVMe Tiering feature was first previewed with the release of vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and the feature is now officially supported with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0! ?
Since the original tech preview, all major limitations and unsupported workload profiles that would prevent an organization from deploying NVMe Tiering in production has been resolved as part of the VCF 9.0 release.
Although Nested Virtualization is NOT officially supported, many users rely on Nested ESXi for testing, development, and learning purposes. With that said, if you have NVMe Tiering enabled on an ESXi 9.0 host and you attempt to power on a Nested ESXi VM or VM that is configured with Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VHV), it will fail to power on with the following error message as shown in the screenshot below.
While it was possible to use Nested ESXi with the tech preview of NVMe Tiering, it was just not in scope as part of productizing NVMe Tiering for VCF 9.0.
All hope is not lost, while Nested Virtualization is still NOT officially supported by Broadcom, it is a very useful feature not just for our users but also for internal development purposes and after speaking with the tech lead for NVMe Tiering, this is something that will be addressed in a future update of VCF and this is just a short term limitation for now if you intend to run Nested ESXi workloads.
All I can find is VMware-VMvisor-Installer-8.0U3e-24677879.x86_64.iso(618.34 MB). Should ESXi 9 also be available as a free version, to support this latest NVMe Tiering?
Hello William,
Thank you very much for the valuable information.
I recently tested Memory Tiering on nested ESXi 9, and I can confirm that it works perfectly :).
Note that Memory Tiering is disabled on the physical host, and all VMs are running on SSD storage.
I wanted to test the same thing in another vSAN environment (Memory Tiering is disabled on the physical hosts), but unfortunately, I wasn’t successful. Have you already tested it?
Thanks again.
I'm wondering if it would be possible to set up a nested VCF9 environment on an ESXi 8U3 host with NVMe memory tiering enabled?
Hardware configuration:
- MS-A2 with 128GB physical RAM
- NVMe local storage
- ESXi 8U3g with NVMe memory tiering on a total of 384GB
- Holodeck 9.0
Has anyone already tested or tried this?
Looking forward to this! Hopefully it doesn't take too long until it's possible to leverage NVMe tiering for nested environments.