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Updating handshakeTimeoutMs setting for ESXi 7.x & 8.x using configstorecli

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With the introduction of the ESXi Configuration Store back in vSphere 7.0 Update 1, all ESXi configuration changes should be managed using either the configstorecli for an individual ESXi host or leveraging the new vSphere Configuration Profiles (VCP) for scale with vCenter Server.

For certain ESXi hostd configurations such as configuring the handshakeTimeoutUs property, which has changed locations from several locations including /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml and /etc/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg to now /etc/vmware/rhttpproxy/config.xml in the latest ESXi 8.x release, it can be challenging to figure out the correct configstorecli syntax.

Having spent some time playing with the configstorecli, I was able to quickly help a customer recently who was looking to update the handshakeTimeoutUs property for ESXi 7.x and I wanted to make it easy for folks to find the syntax for both ESXi 7.x and 8.x.

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Identifying vSphere with Tanzu Managed VMs

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With an increasing number of customers enabling the vSphere with Tanzu capability, which is included in both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), more and more Virtual Machines will be deployed using the more modern approach of declarative provisioning using the powerful VM Service feature.


When using the vSphere UI, you can easily distinguish between a vSphere with Tanzu managed VM from a traditional VM by checking whether it is provisioned within a vSphere Namespace or whether it contains the "Developer Managed" label as shown in the screenshot above.

However, how do you identify a vSphere with Tanzu managed VM when using the vSphere API for Automation purposes?

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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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