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Customizing SMBIOS strings (hardware manufacturer and vendor) for Nested ESXi 

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Nested ESXi continues to be an invaluable resource that I use on almost a daily basis from solution prototyping, customer reproduction to automated lab deployments supporting both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), the use cases are simply endless!

While you can do almost anything with Nested ESXi, mimicking or simulating specific hardware strings such as the manufacturer or vendor is not really possible or at least very easily. I was recently reminded of this topic again as this has been something I wanted to look into but just not had the time. In fact, some of this was inspired by a conversation I had with fellow colleague Luke Huckaba who found a clever trick playing with the default Virtual Machine boot ROMs which are shipped with both ESXi and our VMware Desktop Hypervisors (Workstation/Fusion).

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

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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! 🥳

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Unable to power on vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) VM in Nested ESXi with no host is compatible with the virtual machine

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After deploying a new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Workload Domain using the VCF Holodeck Toolkit, which leverages Nested ESXi, I noticed the vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) VMs kept failing to power on and threw the following error message:

No host is compatible with the virtual machine


I thought this was quite strange, especially since the vCLS VMs ran fine when the VCF Management Domain was setup.

UPDATE (07/03/2024) - The reason for the vCLS error is actually due to the miss-configuration of the Nested ESXi VM created by VCF Holodeck Toolkit, please see this blog post for an easier fix.

Looking at the vmware.log for the vCLS VM, I quickly found the issue where the VM expects to have the MWAIT CPU instruction exposed:

2024-03-19T16:35:35.736Z In(05)+ vmx - Power on failure messages: Feature 'cpuid.mwait' was 0, but must be 0x1.
2024-03-19T16:35:35.736Z In(05)+ vmx - Module 'FeatureCompatLate' power on failed.
2024-03-19T16:35:35.736Z In(05)+ vmx - Failed to start the virtual machine.

I figure I was probably not the first person to run into this and asked Ben Sier, who works on Holodeck and indeed he ran into this before. It looks like with newer vSphere releases, it expects to configure Per-VM EVC but the vCLS VM may not function properly within a Nested ESXI environment. Luckily, Ben has a workaround that we can quickly use.

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