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vSphere 8.0 Update 1c resolves Windows VBS performance & Hyper-V Generation 2 Nested VM running on AMD CPU

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vSphere 8.0 Update 1c was just released and one of the resolved issues mentioned in the ESXi release notes is the following:

Nested virtual machines on AMD CPUs with operational systems such as Windows with virtualization-based security (VBS) might experience performance degradation, timeouts, or unresponsiveness due to an issue with the virtualization of AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), also known as Nested Page Tables (NPT).

UPDATE (10/11/23) - This is also resolved in the ESXi 7.0 Update 3o release

There are two scenarios in which this fix resolves:

  1. Running Windows Server VM with a Hyper-V enabled Generation 2 VM (Nested Virtualization) on AMD CPU
  2. Running Windows Server VM with VBS Enabled (Non-Nested VM) on AMD CPU

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ESXi on AMD ChangWang CW56-58

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It can be pretty difficult to find an AMD-based small form factor (SFF) kit that is compatible with recent ESXi releases. The large majority of these AMD SFF kits all use Realtek for their onboard network adaptor and Realtek does not have a driver for ESXi, nor have they expressed any interests in creating one.

This is also quite unfortunate, as there have been some pretty interesting AMD kits that have been released in the market, but they can not be fully utilized due to the network driver challenges. Prior to the holiday break, fellow VMware colleague Hilko Lantinga, who works in our End User Computing (EUC) division had reached out about a new AMD kit that he had just acquired and has been very happy with after putting it through its paces, especially from a power efficiency standpoint for his updated VMware Homelab.

The system is from a vendor called ChangWang, which I was not familiar with and the AMD kit is the CW56-58, which is based on an AMD Zen 3 architecture (7nm) and what stands out immediately is that this system includes four built-in network adaptors (hint: they are all compatible with latest ESXi 8.0 release)! I asked if he would be willing to sharing his thorough review with the community as this could be a really interesting system and below is Hilko's detailed write-up in his own words.


The following content below is a contribution from Hilko Lantinga.

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DFI GHF51 - Worlds smallest AMD Ryzen SBC

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Awhile back I came to learn about an interesting AMD single board computer (SBC) from a company called DFI, which specializes in building embedded solutions and industrial motherboards. There are a number of vendors in this space, including OnLogic, Rugged Computers, ASRock Industrial to name a few and Bivrost which I had recently came to learn about. The Industrial vertical is actually a really interesting segment of the market that includes manufacturing, oil, gas and utilities and is often associated with the Internet of Things (IoT), also referred to as the Industrial IoT (IIoT) market.

The demands and requirements of the Industrial IoT market is wildly different from your typical Enterprise datacenter, especially when you think about some of the harsh environments that hardware must run whether that is a manufacturing facility to a remote oil rig. It is not uncommon that the hardware used must be able to withstand extreme temperature changes with greater levels of reliability but also longer duration of support and product availability for up to 10 years!


With all that said, I was pretty intrigued with their latest offering called the GHF51, which comes in at an ultra tiny 1.8" inches and is dubbed the worlds smallest board with an AMD Ryzen CPU. You can see how tiny the SBC is compared to a lego mini-figure pictured above.

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