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Quick Tip: New Hyper-V guestOS identifier in vSphere 5.5

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For those of you who are so inclined to run Hyper-V as a nested VM on ESXi 5.5 (not sure why anyone would want to do such a thing), you should be aware that there is a new guestOS identifier that you can configure your VM to for the most optimal configuration. The main reasons you would want to use this configuration is that by default Windows Enlightenment is enabled and this will prevent Hyper-V from running as it will detect it is running inside of a VM. This configuration will disable Windows Enlightenment to allow you to run Hyper-V.

I noticed a new guestOS identifier called "windowsHyperVGuest" while browsing through the vSphere 5.5 API Reference guide, but when I checked the vSphere Web Client, I did not see this guestOS type as an available option. Perhaps this was not a supported guestOS, after all Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware. In any case, you can still configure your VM by leveraging the vSphere API.

Here is a quick vSphere SDK for Perl script called changeGuestOSID.pl which allows you to reconfigure a VM with a valid guestOS identifier from the vSphere API Reference guide. You can of course easily do this using PowerCLI as well as any other language that can speak to the vSphere API.

Once updated, you should now see it reflected in both the vSphere Web/C# Client:

Note: I did not do extensive testing other than basic installation of latest Hyper-V Server and I do not believe you need any additional settings. If you wish to run nested 64-bit VMs, then you will need to enable VHV.

How to bootstrap vCenter Server onto a single VSAN node Part 1?

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By now, I am sure you have heard about VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) and you are probably anxious to give it a spin once the beta becomes publicly available in the very near future. I have been doing some testing in my lab with VSAN, not Nested VSAN, but on actual physical hardware. While getting started, I hit an interesting challenge given my physical hardware configuration and also this being a greenfield deployment.

Let me explain by what I mean by this. In my lab, I have three physical hosts and each contains a single SSD and single SATA drive. Each host has been provisioned with a small 5GB iSCSI boot LUN that is used to install ESXi (this could have also been another local disk or even USB/SD card). Though VSAN itself is built into the VMkernel, the management of the VSAN cluster, configurations and policies are all performed through vCenter Server. So for a greenfield deployment, you would need to first deploy a vCenter Server which would then require you to consume at least one of the local disks. This is the good ol chicken and egg problem!

In my environment, this was a problem because I only have a single SSD and SATA disk and I would not be able to setup a VSAN datastore for all three hosts at once. This meant I had to do the following steps:

  1. Create a local VMFS volume on the first ESXi host
  2. Deploy vCenter Server and then create a VSAN Cluster
  3. Add the two other ESXi host to the VSAN Cluster
  4. Storage vMotion the vCenter Server to the VSAN Datastore
  5. Destroy the local VMFS datastore on first ESXi host (existing VMFS partitions will not work with VSAN) & delete partitions
  6. Add the first ESXi host to VSAN Cluster

As you can see this can get a bit complicated and potentially error prone when needing to destroy VMFS volumes ...

I figured there had to be a better way and I was probably not going to be the only one hitting this scenario for a greenfield and even potentially for a brownfield deployments. In talking to Christian Dickmann, a Tech Lead for the VSAN project, I learned about a really cool feature of VSAN in which you can actually bootstrap vCenter Server onto a single VSAN node! This was possible due to the tight integration of VSAN within the VMkenel and best part about this solution is that it is fully SUPPORTED by VMware. From an operational perspective, this deployment workflow is much easier and intuitive than the process listed above. This also allows you to maximize the use of your hardware investment by running both your core infrastructure VMs as well as your regular workloads all on the VSAN datastore which is great for small or ROBO offices.

In my environment, I start out with a single ESXi 5.5 host which contains a single SSD and SATA disk and I create single VSAN node from that ESXi host and contribute its storage to the VSAN datastore. I then deploy a vCenter Server for which I am using the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) for quick and easy deployment. The default policy for VSAN is to automatically ensure there is at least one additional replica of the VM as new ESXi compute nodes join the VSAN cluster.

Once the vCenter Server is online, I can then create a vSphere Cluster and enable it with VSAN and add all three ESXi 5.5 hosts to the vSphere Cluster. This will then contribute all their storage to the VSAN datastore all while the vCenter Server is happily running. Once the other ESXi hosts join the VSAN cluster, we will automatically get replication between the other nodes to ensure our vCenter Server is replicated and of course you can change this policy.

As you can see this is much simpler setup than having to start out with an existing VMFS or even NFS datastore to initially store the vCenter Server and then create the VSAN datstore and migrate the vCenter Server. I also like how I can start deploying my infrastructure with a single ESXi host and then slowly bring in additional ESXi hosts (just make sure you do it in timely fashion as you have a SPOF until then). In part two of this article, I will go into more details on how to configure the single VSAN node and bootstrap vCenter Server. In the meantime, if you have not checked out these awesome articles by some of my VMware colleagues, I would highly recommend you give them a read, especially Cormac's awesome VSAN series!

Here is How to bootstrap vCenter Server onto a single VSAN node Part 2?

If you are interested in testing out VSAN, be sure to sign up for the beta here!

Cormac Hogan

Duncan Epping

Dave Hill

How to Run Windows 8 Consumer Preview & Windows 8 Server on vSphere 5

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A few weeks back I wrote an article on how to run Windows 8 Developer Preview on ESXi 5, which required a small trick to get working. Today, it looks like Microsoft just released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Windows 8 Server. For those looking to give these a try, you can do so by using vSphere 5.

Disclaimer: VMware still does not officially support Windows 8 on vSphere, this is mainly for educational and testing purposes. Do not use this in a production environment

UPDATE (06/02/12): The steps below are the same for the recent release of Windows 8 Release Preview and Windows Server 2008 (Windows 8 Server) RC.

Here are the three easy steps to run Windows 8 on ESXi 5

  1. Download and install ESXi500-201112001 (patch02) from VMware patch repository.
  2. Create either a Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 regular VM (You will need to use e1000 network driver, VMXNET3 does not work)
  3. Install Windows 8 Consume Preview or Server using the ISO (tested with 64bit) 

Note: Unlike the Developer Preview, no additional tweaks are needed to install Windows 8 Consumer Preview other than the ESXi 5.0 patch. 

    When you first boot up Windows 8, you should see this fish logo. Be patient and give it a few minutes to load:

     Shortly after, you will be prompted to start the installation:

    Here is a screenshot of Windows 8 Consumer Preview running on ESXi 5.0:

    Here is a screenshot of Windows 8 Server running on ESXi 5.0:

    Here is a screenshot of Windows 8 Server w/Hyper-V role enabled running on ESXi 5.0:

    To enable Hyper-V role, you will need to perform the following changes:

    • Update the guestOS to Windows 8 64bit using the vSphere Client
    • Add the following CPUID bits using the vSphere Client
    • Add the advanced setting using the vSphere Client hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE as described by this article as well as mce.enabled = TRUE (this is a new parameter introduced in ESXi 5) which is needed to run Hyper-V3 in Windows 8
    • Install Hyper-V role
    • Shutdown host
    • Remove advanced setting using the vSphere Client
    • Host should now boot and you should see the Hyper-V manager interface

    Note: You can install VMware Tools on either Windows 8 releases by right clicking on the VM->Guest->Install VMware Tools. If you install VMware Tools on Windows 8 Server, you may need to enable 3D support if you get a black screen after installation as noted in this article.

    So if you are itching to try out the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview or Server, you can install it and run it on vSphere 5!