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Customizing SMBIOS strings (hardware manufacturer and vendor) for Nested ESXi 

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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).

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Troubleshooting ESXi Shutting down firmware services and UEFI Runtime Services (RTS) error message

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Several months back, I was helping a customer debug an issue where I needed to install the GA release of ESXi 6.7! Yikes, it certainly has been a minute since I have installed anything older than 7.x but I figured it should still work fine with recent hardware like an Intel NUC systems, right?

After the ESXi installer started to boot up, it eventually halted with the following message:

Shutting down firmware services...

Using 'simple offset' UEFI RTS mapping policy


I decided to give it one more go by using a more recent release of ESXi 6.7 Update 3 and to my surprise, not only did ESXi installed perfectly fine but I did not run into the error message shown abvove!

I then realized that perhaps this has something to do with the ESXi bootloader, like any piece of software, there are fixes and enhancements with newer releases. I also recall a conversation with one of our Engineers that the ESXi bootloader is also designed to be backwards compatible, so that gave me an idea to try replacing the default ESXi 6.7 GA bootloader files with the ones found in ESXi 6.7 Update 3 and now I was able to install ESXi 6.7 GA release!

However, my success did not last very long as I ran into a slightly different message after the initial reboot:

Shutting down firmware services…

UEFI runtime services support is disabled

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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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