by William Lam // 2 Comments
Happy 2025! 🎉 Here is a fun one to kick off the New Year ☺️
Last year, I demonstrated a method for customizing the SMBIOS hardware string using Nested ESXi, but the solution was not perfect and required hacking up a VM ROM file and it was also limited to using the BIOS firmware for your Nested ESXi VM as the behavior for EFI firmware was different.
I was doing some research towards the end of last year and I came across a much more elegant solution that works for both physical and virtual ESXi!
by William Lam // 10 Comments
Nested ESXi continues to be an invaluable resource that I use on almost a daily basis from solution prototyping, customer reproduction to automated lab deployments supporting both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), the use cases are simply endless!
While you can do almost anything with Nested ESXi, mimicking or simulating specific hardware strings such as the manufacturer or vendor is not really possible or at least very easily. I was recently reminded of this topic again as this has been something I wanted to look into but just not had the time. In fact, some of this was inspired by a conversation I had with fellow colleague Luke Huckaba who found a clever trick playing with the default Virtual Machine boot ROMs which are shipped with both ESXi and our VMware Desktop Hypervisors (Workstation/Fusion).