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Quick Tip - Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI is not supported on this platform for VMware Workstation

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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:

  • Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT is not supported on this platform 
  • Virtualized AMD-V/RVI is not supported on this platform 

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.

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Sharing a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering, ESXi-OSDATA & VMFS Datastore? 

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With the ability to to share a single NVMe device for both NVMe Tiering and a local VMFS datastore ... I had an idea to push this further and see if I could also get an ESXi-OSData partition running on the same shared NVMe device! 🤔

Simliar to the previous blog post, the underlying use case is really for dev/test environment where you may not have a ton of NVMe devices to dedicate to the various ESXi functions, especially true for those using small form factor (SFF) systems like an ASUS NUC or simliar. Most of the mainstream SFF systems usually comes with two, maybe three NVMe slots if you are lucky.

This technique would allow you to boot ESXi off of USB and then have key functions like ESXi-OSData and NVMe Tiering on a single shared NVMe while freeing up the other NVMe devices for use with vSAN, which you should have dedicated devices for whether you are considering vSAN OSA or ESA.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

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Quick Tip - Retrieving vSAN usage & overhead information using vSAN API

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Within the vSphere UI, you can view a detailed breakdown of your vSAN storage utilization including various system overhead by selecting a specific vSAN Cluster and then navigating to Monitor->vSAN->Capacity as shown in the screenshot below.


Different vSAN configuration such using vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) or vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) and whether capabilities like vSAN Deduplication and Compression is enabled will yield different utilization metrics that are displayed.

I recently had an inquiry asking how to retrieve the vSAN Deduplication and Compression overhead information using PowerCLI?

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