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Ultimate Lab Resource for VCF 9.0

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Since the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, you may have seen a few blogs from me ?

To help folks digest all the resources for deploying and running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 in a lab environment, I have put this blog post together to summarize the various considerations and/or tweaks that will allow you to get the full experience of VCF 9.0 for non-production/commercial usage.

Make sure you to bookmark this page as I will continue to add new updates, I still have a number of backlog items to share ... but for now that will have to wait as I am in need of some PTO, which starts tomorrow! ?

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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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How to upgrade VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with PVSCSI controller incompatibility?

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If you are running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a lab using Nested ESXi and you attempt an upgrade workflow, you may find the following upgrade pre-check fail with the following message: VSAN SCSI controller is not VMware certified


You might think you are out of luck, but it is actually pretty straight forward to bypass the checks and still allow the upgrade to proceed, something I recently went through myself when upgrading my VCF 5.1.1 environment to the latest 5.2 release.

Note: To use vSAN ESA in VCF, you should configure your Nested ESXi VM to use an NVMe Controller instead of PVSCSI Controller, so its possible that by changing the controller type, you may not run into this error simliar to findings here. You can also override the vSAN HCL JSON with your own custom HCL JSON which includes the PVSCSI controller by following the blog post here and that would also allow you to proceed, but steps below are the easiest as you do not have to do anything special.

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