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Nested ESXi installation using HTTPS boot over VirtualEFI in vSphere 8

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In vSphere 7.0 Update 2, an enhancement was made to the Virtual Machine's UEFI firmware called VirtualEFI that would enable ESXi to run in a VM (Nested ESXi) and perform an HTTP Boot given the ESXi bootloader URL without requiring any traditional PXE infrastructure.

This was especially useful for anyone testing or developing ESXi automation for use with ESXi Kickstart, where you can quickly prototype your automation without additional infrastructure dependencies and once the automation has been vetted, you can then leverage that exact same automation in your physical ESXi provisioning infrastructure.

The original solution had only supported HTTP and I recently came to learn that we can now also support HTTPS in vSphere 8!

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Simplified Nested ESXi installation in ESXi 7.0 Update 2 using HTTP Boot over VirtualEFI

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Deploying an ESXi scripted installation aka Kickstart running within a VM (Nested ESXi) has a number of benefits, especially for testing and development purposes. This was something I did regularly as a customer, especially with new releases of ESXi to ensure our existing automation scripts and processes continued to work before rolling out into production. ESXi kickstart itself is pretty straight forward, but the required supporting infrastructure (PXE Server, DHCP, TFTP, etc) that needs to be configured, especially for a greenfield deployment can often be challenging for new comers.

Even with an existing PXE infrastructure, it can often be difficult to configure or troubleshoot depending on your level of access which does not add any value in actually testing or automating the ESXi scripted installation process. In ESXi 7.0 Update 2, an enhancement was made to the Virtual Machine's UEFI firmware called VirtualEFI that would enable ESXi to perform an HTTP Boot given the ESXi bootloader URL and without requiring any of the traditional PXE infrastructure.

To take advantage of this new capability, you just need to have a physical server running ESXi 7.0 Update 2 and a VM that is configured with the latest vHW19 compatibility. To configure HTTP boot, you will need to add the following two VM Advanced Settings:

  • networkBootProtocol - httpv4 or httpv6
  • networkBootUri - HTTP URL to the ESXi bootloader (bootx64.efi)

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware

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How to copy the Raspberry Pi UEFI files and boot ESXi-Arm using just USB device?

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There are actually a number of ways to boot and install the ESXi-Arm Fling, but the easiest method is already outlined in the official ESXi-Arm Raspberry Pi (rPI) documentation and the PDF can be downloaded from the Fling website. As a quick refresher, you only need to have two storage devices.

  • SD Card - Used to store the rPI UEFI files which is required to boot ESXi-Arm Installer
    • ESXi-Arm can not run on SD Card and for these reasons, you do not need a large capacity SD Card
  • USB Device - Contains ESXi-Arm Installer / Installation
    • After the ESXi-Arm installer boots, you can actually re-use the exact same USB device for the installation of ESXi-Arm itself. A separate USB device is not required unless that is your goal or if the capacity is not enough for running VMs

The boot process after the ESXi-Arm installation is that the UEFI firmware will first load on the rPI and then it will boot up the ESXi-Arm from the USB device. As mentioned, there are other variations but this is the most basic option. The other nice behavior is that if you need to re-install ESXi-Arm, you simply create a bootable USB device with the ESXi-Arm installer and then install that right on the same USB device without having to mess with UEFI image. This also allows you to perform scripted installation also known as Kickstart, which is something I will be covering in the future that takes UEFI image into consideration.

I have seen a few questions asked whether it is possible to have everything run off of the SD Card and/or USB Device and the answer is yes to certain degree.

  • It is possible to put the ESXi-Arm installer + UEFI on SD Card but ESXi-Arm will NOT be able to use it as installation media, so there is not a whole ton of value there.
  • It is possible to have both the UEFI image and ESXi Installation on the same USB device, especially if you do not have spare SD Cards which apparently has come up a few times

In this blog post, I will outline the instructions for booting an installed ESXi-Arm installation completely off of the USB device without the needing an SD Card containing the UEFI image.

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