Search Results for: nested esxi

Updated Nested ESXi 8.x & 9.0 Virtual Appliance

08.24.2025 by William Lam // 19 Comments

Happy Sunday! Before the wave of announcements starts rolling out from VMware Explore Las Vegas, which starts tomorrow, I wanted to share a quick update. 😅

I have been pretty swamped for the past couple of months, so it has taken a bit more time to get the latest Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances published, but here are the latest 8.0 Update 3 and 9.0 versions. I have included the direct links to the download but also the intermediate Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) links for those interested in bookmarking these pages.

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Failed to locate kickstart on Nested ESXi VM CD-ROM in VCF 9.0

06.20.2025 by William Lam // 2 Comments

If you are automating the installation of ESXi using a scripted installation (aka Kickstart) and the KS.CFG is located on a CD-ROM device and you happen to be using a Nested ESXi VM and see the following message:

cannot find kickstart file on cd-rom with path -- /KS.CFG

You are probably using an IDE-based controller for the CD-ROM device, which the underlying IDE driver for ESXi has been removed as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.

The fix is to simply remove the IDE controller and use a SATA controller and things will work as expected!

vSAN ESA HCL hardware mock VIB for Nested ESXi

01.23.2025 by William Lam // 4 Comments

Whether you are configuring vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) directly from vCenter Server or from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the underlying ESXi hardware is automatically validated against the vSAN ESA Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) to ensure that you are using supported vSAN hardware.

In the case of vCenter Server, you can simply ignore the HCL warnings and accept the risks and proceed with the configuration but when using VCF, the operation is blocked to ensure customers have a good experience when selecting vSAN ESA when deploying a VCF Management or Workload Domain.

With that said, there is workaround where you can create your own custom vSAN ESA HCL JSON based on the hardware that you have and then upload that to either Cloud Builder for setting up a new VCF Management Domain or to SDDC Manager for deploying a new VCF Workload Domain, which I have blogged about HERE and HERE.

The use of Nested ESXi is a very popular way to deploy VCF, especially if you are new to solution and allows you to easily experiment and learn. More recently, I have noticed an uptick in the interests for deploying VCF with vSAN ESA and while you can certainly generate a custom vSAN ESA HCL as mentioned earlier, the process still requires some effort and in some situations the vSAN ESA HCL could get overwritten leading some frustration in debugging.

After helping some folks debug their VCF environments recently, I was thinking about a better experience and leveraging another technique that may not be very well known externally ...

UPDATE (02/03/25) - This solution can also be used for a physical ESXi deployment for use with vSAN ESA and VCF.

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