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Using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) to remediate Nested ESXi host with CPU on the host is not supported 

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If you are running a Nested ESXi VM on top of a physical ESXi host that does not have a supported CPU and you are using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), the pre-check and/or remediation will fail due to the following error:

The CPU on the host is not supported by this image


The solution is actually quite simple and is similiar to what you had to do for your physical ESXi host by adding the ESXi kernel boot option allowLegacyCPU=true to successfully boot and install ESXi as recently explained in this blog post. To emulate this setup, I am using my trusty 2011 Apple Mac Mini which is running ESXi 8.0 with the kernel boot option and it is then running a Nested ESXi 7.0 Update 3g VM.

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Enabling vSAN 8 Express Storage Architecture (ESA) using Nested ESXi

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To get the full benefits and support of the new vSAN 8 Express Storage Architecture (ESA), you will need modern hardware from the official vSAN ESA Ready Node HCL. However, from an education and learning point of view, you may want to explore some of the VSAN ESA workflows and easiest way to do that, well you probably know the answer .... it is using Nested ESXi of course!

With my recently published vSphere and vSAN 8 Lab Deployment Script, you can use that as the base and the Nested ESXi 8.0 IA Virtual Appliance to setup vSAN 8 ESA using virtual hardware 😀


There are only a couple of things to be aware of prior to setting up vSAN ESA using Nested ESXi.

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Emulating a Virtual USB storage device using Nested ESXi

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My buddy Alan Renouf had pinged me earlier today and asked whether it was possible to emulate a USB storage device that could aide him in the testing the installation of ESXi from a USB device but without having to use a real USB device. I honestly was not aware of any mechanisms that would allow for this and I normally would just passthrough a real USB device to a Nested ESXi VM for this type of testing purposes.

While thinking about his question, I also recall we had made some enhancements to our Virtual USB interface that would allow user to back it using a disk file. While searching further, I came to learn that not only was this possible, but it was also a common method for testing USB-based installation without the hassle of messing with physical hardware. It turns out you can just present a Virtual Disk (VMDK) to a VM running ESXi (Nested ESXi) and through a special driver, it will recognize the device as a USB storage device!

I definitely wish I had learned about this earlier and it goes to show, all the hard engineering efforts made by our VMware Engineers to make testing and using our software as easy as possible even without needing real physical hardware 😀

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