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Quick Tip - Upgrading VMware Tools for Nested ESXi 6.0

04.03.2015 by William Lam // 2 Comments

I have received several questions about this in the last couple of weeks regarding the process of upgrading VMware Tools for running Nested ESXi 5.x and 6.0 when the physical ESXi host has been upgraded to ESXi 6.0. Instead of individual replies, I thought I would share this quick tip. First off, VMware Tools for Nested ESXi provides a very specific set of capabilities for Nested ESXi guests as shown below:

Provides guest OS information of the nested ESXi Hypervisor (eg. IP address, configured hostname, etc.).
Allows the nested ESXi VM to be cleanly shut down or restarted when performing power operations with the vSphere Web/C# Client or vSphere APIs.
Executes scripts that help automate ESXi guest OS operations when the guest’s power state changes.
Supports the Guest Operations API (formally known as the VIX API).

Unlike traditional VMware Tools which may provide updated capabilities with each new release, VMware Tools for Nested ESXi exposes only a subset of those capabilities which has not changed between ESXi 5.x and 6.0. This is an important fact to be aware of because you may see "Unsupported older version" for the VMware Tools status in the vSphere Web/C# Client and this is perfectly fine and expected.

Here is a screenshot of a Nested ESXi 5.5 VM with VMware Tools installed running on top of an upgraded physical ESXi 6.0 host:

In this scenario, the VMware Tools status will be reported as "Unsupported older version" because the version of VMware Tools does not match the latest version of VMware Tools included with ESXi 6.0. However, you should not be alarm as the expected functionality listed above will continue to work without any problems and you can just ignore the UI warning. The only way to get rid of this warning is to upgrade the Nested ESXi VM to ESXi 6.0 which I go over in more details below. I know upgrading may not be an option if you still wish to run ESXi 5.x, but as far as I know, there will not be an update to VMware Tools VIB for ESXi 6.0 as it is now pre-installed with ESXi 6.0.

Here is a screenshot of the same VM which has now been upgraded to ESXi 6.0 running on top of an upgraded physical ESXi 6.0 host:

In this case, the VMware Tools status will be reported as "Unsupported older version" because the version of VMware Tools does not match the latest version of VMware Tools included with ESXi 6.0. However, because VMware Tools now comes pre-installed with ESXi 6.0. We can easily remedy this by removing the VMware Tools VIB we installed for ESXi 5.x by running the following ESXCLI command and then rebooting:

esxcli software vib remove -n esx-tools-for-esxi

Once the ESXi host has rebooted, the VMware Tools that is pre-installed with ESXi 6.0 will automatically start up if it detects it is running as a VM. If you now look at your vSphere Web/C# Client, you will see that VMware Tools status shows current and is also the default behavior if you are running Nested ESXi 6.0 VM on top of physical ESXi 6.0 host.

With VMware Tools being pre-installed with ESXi 6.0 and only loaded when it detects it is being run as a VM, you no longer need to worry about manually installing additional VIBs get the benefits of having VMware Tools installed for your Nested ESXi VMs.

How to configure SMP-FT using Nested ESXi in vSphere 6?

03.06.2015 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Symmetric Multi-Processing Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT) has been a long-awaited feature by many VMware customers. With the release of vSphere 6.0, the SMP-FT capability is now finally available and if you want to try out this new feature and see how it works from a "functional" perspective, you can easily do so by running it in a Nested ESXi environment. SMP-FT no longer uses the "record/replay" capability like its younger brother Uniprocessing Fault Tolerance (UP-FT). Instead, SMP-FT now uses a new Fast Checkpointing technique which not only improves the overall performance of its predecessor but also greatly simplifies and reduces additional configurations when running in a Nested ESXi environment.

Disclaimer: Running SMP-FT in a Nested ESXi environment does not replace or substitute actual testing of physical hardware. For any type of performance testing, please test SMP-FT using real hardware.

Requirements:

pESXi host running either ESXi 5.5 or 6.0
vCenter Server 6.0
2 x Nested ESXi VMs running ESXi 6.0 (vHW9+)
Shared storage for the Nested ESXi VMs

Instructions:

Step 1 - Created a Nested ESXi VM using guestOS type "ESXi 5.5/6.0 or later". You will need at least 2 vCPU or greater, 4GB of memory or greater for the installation of ESXi and most importantly, a VMXNET3 network adapter. The reason a VMXNET3 adapter is required is that SMP-FT has a requirement for 10Gbit network connection and the VMXNET3 driver can simulate a 10Gbit connection for a Nested ESXi VM. For further instructions on creating a Nested ESXi VM, please take a look at this article. If you are unable to add VMXNET3 adapter, you may need to first change the guestOS type to "Other 64-bit", add the adapter and then change the guestOS type back.

Step 2 - Install ESXi 6.0 on the Nested ESXi VM and ensure you also have a vCenter Server 6.0 deployed if you have not done so already and add your Nested ESXi instances to a new vSphere Cluster which has vSphere HA enabled.

Step 3 - You will need to enable both vMotion and Fault Tolerance traffic type for the VMkernel interface that you wish to run FT traffic across.

Step 4 - At this point, you can create a real or dummy VM and power it on. Once you have the powered on VM, you can now enable either UP-FT or SMP-FT by right clicking and selecting "Enable Fault Tolerance".

As you can see from the screenshot above, I have successfully enabled FT on a VM with 4vCPU running inside of a Nested ESXi VM, how cool is that!? Hopefully this will help you get more familiar with the new SMP-FT feature when you are ready to give it a real spin on real hardware 🙂

Note: Intel Sandy Bridge is recommended when using SMP-FT (real physical hardware) but if you have older CPUs, you enable "Legacy FT" mode by adding the following VM Advanced Setting "vm.uselegacyft" to the VM you are enabling FT on.

VMware Tools is now pre-installed with Nested ESXi 6.0

02.26.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

I just came across this super awesome little tidbit from Core Nested ESXi Engineer Jim Mattson, that ESXi 6.0 now comes per-installed with VMware Tools when running Nested ESXi. This means you no longer have to manually install the VMware Tools for Nested ESXi but ESXi will be able to automatically detect that it is running inside of a VM and automatically startup the vmtoolsd process.

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

Screen Shot 2015-02-26 at 9.25.12 AM
This new feature of Nested ESXi is agnostic to the underlying physical ESXi version as well as the virtual hardware version. The only requirement is that the Nested ESXi is running ESXi 6.0. Talk about ease of use, this just made Nested ESXi that much cooler as if it was not already! 🙂

If you need to directly call into the vmtoolsd process for extracting OVF properties/etc. make sure you have correct library paths setup before running the vmtoolsd command, else you will get an error. To do so, run the following two commands:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/vmware/vmtools/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=/usr/lib/vmware/vmtools/bin:$PATH