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Nested ESXi 5.1 Supports VMXNET3 Network Adapter Type

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I noticed something interesting while extracting the contents of ESXi 5.1 ISO for some kickstart configurations ....

Do you see it? It's a VMXNET3 driver for the VMkernel! I also confirmed by running the following ESXCLI command querying for the VMkernel module "vmxnet3":

# esxcli system module get -m vmxnet3
Module: vmxnet3
Module File: /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/vmxnet3
License: GPL
Version: Version 1.1.32.0, Build: 799733, Interface: 9.2 Built on: Aug  1 2012
Signed Status:
Signature Issuer:
Signature Digest:
Signature FingerPrint:
Provided Namespaces:
Required Namespaces: [email protected], com.vmware.vmkapi@v2_1_0_0

***Disclaimer***: This is for educational purposes only, this is not officially supported by VMware. Use at your own risk. There is also a mention of this in the vSphere 5.1 release notes that VMs running on nested ESXi hosts using VMXNET3 driver could potentially crash. Again, not supported user at your own risk.

Next I decided to create a Nested ESXi 5.1 VM, but instead of selecting the e1000 driver which was the only network adapter type that would function for running a nested ESXi host, I choose the VMXNET3 adapter and to my surprise ESXi's networking stack was fully functional.

You can see from the above screenshot, I have a two VMXNET3 network adapters for my nested ESXi 5.1 VM. Here are two additional screenshot of the physical adapters as seen by nested ESXi 5.1 host and you can see that it shows up as VMware Inc. VMXNET3

I have not tried any performance tests, so not sure if there are going to be any significant benefits but pretty cool nonetheless!

vInception #NotSupported Slides Posted

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I was pinged by a few folks asking if my #NotSupported session that I presented at VMworld US would be available online, so here is the slide deck to my vInception presentation.

I would also like to thank everyone that attended my session! I had a lot of fun and hopefully you did too!  

UPDATE: I just realized the livestream recording videos are online, but they are not very clear. Apologies for that. I heard the better records from the vBrownbag crew should be up shortly, so once those are up, I will replace them on the site.

Part 1:

Watch live streaming video from vmwarecommunitytv at livestream.com

Part 2:

How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vCloud Director 5.1

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The process to enable  "Nested Virtualization" in the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1 and create your own virtual lab similar to VMware's vSEL (Virtual Sales Enablement Cloud) is very similar to the previous steps outlined for vCloud Director 1.5 release. The only change is how VHV (Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization) aka "Nested Virtualization" is enabled in vCloud Director 5.1 and ESXi 5.1.

In the vCloud Director 1.5, to enable VHV, you needed to add a special SQL statement that would enable VHV for the underlying ESXi 5.0 hosts. With the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1, that is no longer necessary and you now enable it on a Per VM basis within the vCloud Director 5.1 UI.

Here are the steps for enabling VHV for vCloud Director 5.1

  • Insert SQL statements into VCD Database that perform the following:
    • Enable new "VMware" guestOS Family
    • Enable new guestOS Type ESXi 4.x and 5.x
    • Enable host preparation to enable VHV (vSphere 5.0 & vCloud 1.5 only)
  • Enable promiscuous mode
    • Insert SQL statement into VCD Database for Network Pool that is being used for your ESXi VMs
    • Enable both Promiscuous Mode and Forged Transmit for vSphere Backed Portgroup within vCenter Server or ESXi host

The SQL statements can be found in this article and have not changed for vCloud Director 5.1

Here is a screenshot of what you should see in the vCloud Director 5.1 UI for creating a new VM and you should now have the ability to select a new guestOS Type called "VMware" and select either an ESXi 4.x or ESXi 5.x guestOS Version.

To enable VHV for the VM, you will need to also check the box "Exposed hardware-assisted CPU virtualization to guestOS" and this will allow you to run a nested ESXi VM as well as 64-bit nested VMs, assuming your physical CPUs support it. To learn more about running VHV on ESXi 5.1, take a look at this article here for more details.