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How to run Nested RHEV Hypervisor on ESXi?

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I have written a number of articles about VMware Nested Virtualization and even today, I am still surprised at how easy it is to virtualize not only our own hypervisor but other vendor's hypervisors as well. This week I received an interesting question from my old Technical Marketing colleague Rawlinson Rivera who wanted to run a nested RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) Hypervisor on ESXi. This was not something I had done before nor had any interest in doing and I told Rawlinson that it should technically work as long as the guestOS is enabled with VHV.

Rawlinson's attempt at installing RHEV resulted in the VM hanging after boot up. After a bit of research, it turns out some additional tweaks are required to get RHEV running on ESXi. I would like to give a huge thanks to Jim Mattson, one of the VMware developers who help made Nested Virtualization possible, for his assistance.

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

Here are the instructions on creating a virtual machine that can be used to install RHEV (make sure you follow these exact steps, the VM must be created with these settings or it will not work):

Step 1 - Download RHEV 6.3 or 6.4 from Red Hat's website

Step 2 - Create a new Virtual Machine (vHW9) and when you get to the OS selection, you will need to select the following:

Guest Family - Other
Guest Version - Other (64-bit)

Step 3 - When you get to the virtual hardware customization, make sure you select LSI Logic SAS for the SCSI controller and also enable VHV under the CPU option.

Step 4 - Finally, you will need to add the following two advanced virtual machine settings:
vcpu.hotadd = false
apic.xapic.enable = false

Step 5 - Mount the RHEV ISO and once the VM starts to boot up, when you are presented with install/upgrade options, hit the TAB key. This will allow you to change the boot parameters and you will need to move your cursor to the left and remove "quiet" from the command-line which is right after the install keyword and then hit enter.

Note: This is required due to a known issue from Red Hat.

Step 6 - If everything was successful, you should be prompted with RHEV installer:

Step 7 - Once the installer has completed and you reboot, you now have nested RHEV running on ESXi!

Now it is time to delete the VM 😉

VCF 9.1 - Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) & VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) Nested Lab Deployment

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Nested ESX continues to be a popular way to explore and learn about VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), it is also the basis for the VCF Holodeck solution.

With the release of VCF 9.1, Nested ESXi VMs can now run on physical hosts with NVMe Tiering enabled, no workarounds required. In addition, you can extend the benefits of NVMe Tiering to a Nested ESX VM by applying the following VM Advanced Setting.

The easiest and quickest way to deploy a Nested ESX VM is to my Nested ESX Virtual Appliance, which has been refreshed for 9.1!

Note: The latest Nested ESX 9.1 Virtual Appliance no longer comes with default password, you will need to specify that as part of the OVF deployment.

While I have personally switched from using a nested VCF deployments to physical setup, mainly due to lack of resources, I know many of you do have sufficient capacity to run a full VCF deployment in a Nested environment.

I have also refreshed my VMware Cloud Foundation Nested Lab (VCF) Fleet Deployment script to support both VCF and VVF 9.1


Here is a screenshot of the initial deployment that takes ~25 minutes to deploy three Nested ESX VM, initialize the VCF Installer, sync from a VCF Offline Depot, generate the deployment JSON and then automatically start the VCF Fleet deployment. 😎

Quick Tip - Configure Nested ESX Cores per CPU for Optimal Licensing

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If you deploy Nested ESX and wish to use it beyond the default 90 day evaluation, you will need to license the ESX host, just like you would with a physical host.

Whether you create your own Nested ESX VM or simply deploy the the Nested ESX Virtual Appliance, make sure the cores per CPU configuration on the VM is correct or you may need a much larger CPU entitlement than what you had expected.

The default behavior of vSphere when you create a VM is to automatically manage the CPU topology (cores per CPU) when the VM is powered on for optimal GuestOS and Application consumption.


However, this automatic assignment or even a manual assignment could have some unexpected consequences when it comes to ESX licensing ...

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