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Heads Up - Nested ESXi crashes in ESXi 7.0 running on older CPUs

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Thanks to Patrik Kernstock, who works in our Technical Support organization at VMware, for making me aware of an issue related to Nested ESXi running on an ESXi host that has been upgraded to ESXi 7.0. Several folks in the community have noticed after upgrading their Intel NUC 7th Gen and deploying a Nested ESXi VM and powering on an inner-guestOS would causes the Nested ESXi VM to crash.

Upon further investigation, it looks like this is not specific to the Intel NUC platform but rather with a specific generation of CPUs which are Intel Sky Lake-based and as a result, some customers are noticing this affect on their 7th Gen NUC.

UPDATE (06/23/20) - ESXi 7.0b has just been released and contains the fix for the Nested ESXi VM crash. If you are using an Intel NUC 10, do not just apply the patch as the updated ne1000 VIB within the patch will override existing Intel NIC driver causing the network adapter to no longer function. It is recommended that you download the patch and replace the default ne1000 VIB using Image Builder with the Intel NIC version before applying the update. To download the patch, please visit VMware Patch Portal site.

The good news is that this issue has already been reported and we should have a fix in a future update of ESXi. In the meantime, you can still run Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization on these affected CPUs, you just will not be able to power on inner-guest VMs. Big thanks to Patrik for helping out with the testing and triaging this internally.

Quick Tip - Allow unsupported CPUs when upgrading to ESXi 7.0

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As outlined in the vSphere 7.0 release notes (which everyone should carefully read through before upgrading), the following CPU processors are no longer supported:

  • Intel Family 6, Model = 2C (Westmere-EP)
  • Intel Family 6, Model = 2F (Westmere-EX)

To help put things into perspective, these processors were released about 10 years ago! So this should not come as a surprise that VMware has decided remove support for these processors which probably also implies the underlying hardware platforms are probably quite dated as well. In any case, this certainly has affected some folks and from what I have seen, it has mostly been personal homelab or smaller vSphere environments.

One of my readers had reached out to me the other day to share an interesting tidbit which might help some folks prolong their aging hardware for another vSphere release. I have not personally tested this trick and I do not recommend it as you can have other issues longer term or hit a similiar or worse situation upon the next patch or upgrade.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and you run the risk of having more issues in the future.

Per the reader, it looks like you can append the following ESXi boot option which will allow you to bypass the unsupported CPU during the installation/upgrade. To do so, just use SHIFT+O (see VMware documentation for more details) and append the following:

allowLegacyCPU=true

There have also been other interesting and crazy workarounds that attempt to workaround this problem. Although some of these tricks may work, folks should really think long term on what other issues can face by deferring hardware upgrade. I have always looked at homelab as not only a way to learn but to grow yourself as an individual.

Note: The boot option above is only temporarily and you will need to pass in this option upon each restart. It looks like this setting is also not configurable via ESXCLI which I initially had thought, so if you are installing this on a USB device, the best option is to edit the boot.cfg and simply append the parameter to kernelopt line so it'll automatically be included for you without having to manually typing this. If this is install on disk, then you will need to edit both /bootbank/boot.cfg and /altbootbank/boot.cfg for the settings to passed in automatically.

This is ultimately an investment you are making into yourself, so do not cut yourself short and consider looking at a newer platform, especially something like an Intel NUC which is fairly affordable both in cost as well as power, cooling and form factor.

Homelab considerations for vSphere 7

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With the vSphere 7 Launch Event just a few days away, I know many of you are eager to get your hands on this latest release of vSphere and start playing with it in you homelab. A number of folks in the VMware community have already started covering some of the amazing capabilities that will be introduced in vSphere and vSAN 7 and I expect to see that ramp up even more in the coming weeks.

One area that I have not seen much coverage on is around homelab usage with vSphere 7. Given this is a pretty significant release, I think there are some things you should be aware of before you rush out and immediately upgrade your existing homelab environment. As with any vSphere release, you should always carefully review the release notes when they are made available and verify the hardware and its underlying components are officially on the VMware HCL, this is the only way to ensure that you will have a good and working experience.

Having said that, here are just a few of the observations that I have made while running pre-GA builds of vSphere 7 in my own personal homelab. This is not an exhaustive list and I will try to update this article as more information is made available.

Disclaimer: The following considerations below is based on my own personal homelab experience using a pre-GA build of vSphere 7 and it does not reflect any official support or guidance from VMware. Please use these recommendation at your own risk.

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