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Refresher on Nested ESXi Networking Requirements

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Using Nested Virtualization and specifically Nested ESXi, which is running ESXi inside of a VM, has become so automatic and second nature for me and many in the VMware community, that I sometimes forget we still have brand new users who are experiencing ESXi for the very first time.

Nested ESXi is an extremely powerful capability for so many different use cases from development, testing and general learning purposes. Before jumping in and deploying your Nested ESXi environment, which I highly recommend using my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances, you need to make sure that you have proper networking setup or you will run into all sorts of strange issues. For all VMware Nested Virtualization resources, tips and tricks, you will definitely want to bookmark this page HERE.

Disclaimer: Nested Nested ESXi is not officially supported by VMware and Nested Virtualization is only supported under limited scenarios. For more details, please refer to this VMware KB 2009916.

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GPU Passthrough with Nested ESXi

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Advancements in ESXi Nested Virtualization have given us the ability to run ESXi inside of a VM (Nested ESXi) and has allowed us to do just about anything you would with a physical ESXi host for development, testing and learning purposes. In fact, I have shared many tips and tricks for using Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization over the years on my blog, which is worth bookmarking in case you are trying to do something and run into an issue which more than likely, I have come across.

Today, there is very little you can not do using Nested ESXi and is typically limited to a physical device that can not be virtualized and/or emulated in software.

I bring this up because I recently had a chat with Frank Denneman on an unrelated topic and he brought up the question about being able to double passthrough of a GPU from a physical ESXi host into a Nested ESXi VM which would then be passthrough'ed again to a VM running on that Nested ESXi system. While this was not the first time that I had heard of such a request, it does not come up often, this has only been the second time I have heard of this request. For context, his use case was for testing purposes and I can certainly see some interesting scenarios where you want to run vSphere in a Nested environment and still access all the vSphere capabilities including leveraging a physical GPU within that environment, whether that is AI/ML or other graphics process requirements.

My response to Frank was this will not work for a few reasons, one of which is that the use of Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VHV) is not supported with DirectPath I/O and if the GPU is passthrough to a VM, even if it was running ESXi, it would be in control of the GPU, so how could one passthrough it again?

My curiosity got the better of me and given this was the second time I had ever been asked about this, I figured maybe it was worth exploring but before I go down anymore 🐇🕳️, I wanted to get quick sanity check from one of our graphics engineers on the remote feasibility of this ask.

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Nested ESXi installation using HTTPS boot over VirtualEFI in vSphere 8

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In vSphere 7.0 Update 2, an enhancement was made to the Virtual Machine's UEFI firmware called VirtualEFI that would enable ESXi to run in a VM (Nested ESXi) and perform an HTTP Boot given the ESXi bootloader URL without requiring any traditional PXE infrastructure.

This was especially useful for anyone testing or developing ESXi automation for use with ESXi Kickstart, where you can quickly prototype your automation without additional infrastructure dependencies and once the automation has been vetted, you can then leverage that exact same automation in your physical ESXi provisioning infrastructure.

The original solution had only supported HTTP and I recently came to learn that we can now also support HTTPS in vSphere 8!

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