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.