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Quick Tip - Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI is not supported on this platform for VMware Workstation

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In both Microsoft Windows 10 and 11, Virtualization Based Security (VBS) is enabled by default and this capability uses Hyper-V under the hood, which is a form of Nested Virtualization. If you are using VMware Workstation and you attempt to power on a Nested ESXi VM, you probably will see one of the following error messages based on the CPU vendor:

  • Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT is not supported on this platform 
  • Virtualized AMD-V/RVI is not supported on this platform 

While VMware Workstation has been enhanced to co-exists with Hyper-V through a new Host VBS Mode introduced in VMware Workstation 17.x:

Workstation Pro uses a set of newly introduced Windows 10 features (Windows Hypervisor Platform) that permits the use of VT/AMD-V features, which enables Workstation Pro and Hyper-V to coexist. And because VBS is built on Hyper-V, Windows hosts with VBS enabled can now power on VM in Workstation Pro successfully

This are few limitations as mentioned in the VMware Workstation documentation.

With that said, if you do need to run Nested ESXi under VMware Workstation, you just need to disable Windows VBS, assuming you have administrative privileges on your system.

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Pre-release Microsoft OS/2 2.0 on ESXi

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While catching up on my RSS news feed over the weekend, I came across an interesting article titled: Ancient pre-release version of OS/2 2.0 discovered, released in VM-friendly packages and of course the VM-friendly packages caught my attention but I had never heard of or used OS/2 before.

From the article, a software archaeologist known as Neozeed shared a pretty unique experience of installing a pre-release version of Microsoft and IBM OS/2 2.0 ...

A software archaeologist known as Neozeed recently shared a pre-release version of OS/2 2.0, an ambitious PC operating system that Microsoft and IBM were developing together in the 1990s before the former decided to pursue the Windows route.

and this was made possible with the use of the free version of VMware Workstation Player, where they had attributed to the speed of Workstation Player:

VMware is incredibly fast, it's the #1 reason why I had done this.

which I thought was a really cool shoutout for VMware Desktop Hypervisor team!

Neozeed also published a complete video for installing and configuring Microsoft OS/2 using Workstation Player for those intersted:

While I do use VMware Fusion for my macOS desktop, I was curious if the OS/2 VM could also run in ESXi (hint: it does) and wanted to see what the steps would be to run this piece of history on the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 2b release 🙂

Step 1 - Download the Internet Archive OS/2 Workstation VM image that was created by Neozeed

Step 2 - Create a new MSoS2-6.78 directory under your ESXi datastore and upload all files (except for the VMDK, it may fail if you are using vSAN storage like I am)

Step 3 - SCP the MSOS2-6.78.vmdk into the same directory where the rest of the configuration files

Step 4 - Next, we need convert the desktop hypervisor VMDK format to one that ESXi by running the following command in the ESXi Shell:

vmkfstools -i MSOS2-6.78.vmdk -d thin MSOS2-6.78-NEW.vmdk

Step 5 - Register the OS/2 VMX file and then attach the newly created VMDK and finally power on the VM!


Note: For the best desktop experience, connect to OS/2 VM using the Standalone VMRC Client.

Heads Up - Performance Impact with VMware Workstation on Windows 11 with Intel Hybrid CPUs

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There have been some recent reports from users observing performance issues when running VMware Workstation on Windows 11 along with using recent Intel (12th Gen and later) Hybrid CPUs, which introduces a new hybrid big.LITTLE architecture for Intel's x86 consumer CPUs.

This new Intel Hybrid CPU contains two types of CPU cores: Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficiency-cores (E-cores) into the same physical CPU die, which follows a similar design to Apple Silicon CPUs. For information about the new Intel hybrid Intel CPUs, check out this resource HERE.

At first glance, most users had assumed this was due to Virtual Machines being scheduled to run on the less powerful E-Cores, this was problematic even for non-VMware use cases and with the recent introduction of Intel Thread Director, this was supposed to have been improved with Windows 11.

However, after some internal testing, the Intel Hybrid CPU may not actually be the culprit.

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