Happy 2025! 🎉 Here is a fun one to kick off the New Year ☺️
Last year, I demonstrated a method for customizing the SMBIOS hardware string using Nested ESXi, but the solution was not perfect and required hacking up a VM ROM file and it was also limited to using the BIOS firmware for your Nested ESXi VM as the behavior for EFI firmware was different.
I was doing some research towards the end of last year and I came across a much more elegant solution that works for both physical and virtual ESXi!
Not all vSphere-based VMs are the same! This is especially true with the introduction of vSphere IaaS (formally known as vSphere Supervisor or vSphere with Tanzu or Project Pacific) which includes a modern way of provisioning a traditional/classic VM but also a new VM-based form factor known as vSphere Pod VMs.
There was a recent question internally about how you could you distinguish between traditional/classic VMs built from vSphere UI or API versus the vSphere Pod VMs using PowerCLI and specifically using the default Get-VM cmdlet?
In both Microsoft Windows 10 and 11, Virtualization Based Security (VBS) is enabled by default and this capability uses Hyper-V under the hood, which is a form of Nested Virtualization. If you are using VMware Workstation and you attempt to power on a Nested ESXi VM, you probably will see one of the following error messages based on the CPU vendor:
While VMware Workstation has been enhanced to co-exists with Hyper-V through a new Host VBS Mode introduced in VMware Workstation 17.x:
Workstation Pro uses a set of newly introduced Windows 10 features (Windows Hypervisor Platform) that permits the use of VT/AMD-V features, which enables Workstation Pro and Hyper-V to coexist. And because VBS is built on Hyper-V, Windows hosts with VBS enabled can now power on VM in Workstation Pro successfully
This are few limitations as mentioned in the VMware Workstation documentation.
With that said, if you do need to run Nested ESXi under VMware Workstation, you just need to disable Windows VBS, assuming you have administrative privileges on your system.