Now I can go to bed ealier

ESXi 5.1a physical machine hosting an
ESXi 5.1a VM hosting an
ESXi 5.1a VM hosting a
Windows 2008 R2 64 bit VM

It’s a little slow down through all those layers of nesting to get to the Win2008 R2 VM but it’s still useable for some cases where the physical box is a super beast (cases such as training room sessions, developers that need their own VSphere environment, service providers with customers coming over a slow WAN connection anyhow that don’t care about speed but need some sandbox VSphere environments).

The above requires EPT (for Intel) or RVI (for AMD) in the physical CPUs in order to do the nesting properly.

My vCloud Director lab runs as a nested setup so this probably allows me to put ESXi 5.1a into the catalog and deploy a pre-built VSphere lab that can be brought up new relatively quickly (requires a bit of scripting to pull it off). I seem to remember there’s someone who already had this idea going (ESXi coming off a VCD catalog).

Anyhow, thought some might be interested to know that 4th level nesting with x64 VMs at the 4th level is possible.

Datto

See this thread:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/2166303#2166303

That may be interesting to those of you with high-powered gronking physical ESXi servers. Note though that the vSwitches coming off the physical ESXi 5.1 host have to be put into Promiscuous Mode in order for the nested inner VMs running on the nested ESXi VM hosts to be able to see the outside world.

I’m not sure I’d want to do that to a production physical ESXi 5.1 host even if it was supported by VMware. Your call.

But it sure would make for a great training room setup or for a great corporate lab setup where say developers or trainees need their own ESXi and their own VCenter for some reason.

Datto

So, if you don’t have EPT or RVI capable CPUs and you’re currently using Hyper-V running in a VM under ESXi 5.0 you might want to think this through before you upgrade your server to ESXi 5.1.

The discussion is at this link — ask there if you have questions:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/2159987#2159987

Datto

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/bestpractices/nested

Datto

I am running ESXi5.1 on my hardware with vCenter 5.1 and I am trying to install VMTools inside of a nested ESXi VM’s guest OS (ESXi). Is this possible?

Also, is there a forum you know of (outside of this) where nested virtualization is a primary focus?

Thanks,
B

ESXi 5.0U1 physical machine hosting an
ESXi 5.1 VM hosting an
ESXi 5.1 VM hosting a
Windows XP 32 bit VM.

The 4th level VM is faster than I thought it would be considering all the nesting going on (a little less than 50% of what the speed of a normal VM would be but of course, you gain quite a bit of flexibility with nesting).

Requires SLAT capability in your CPUs (EPT from Intel CPUs or RVI from AMD CPUs). I used Opteron 8354 CPUs. By the way, if you haven’t figured it out by now, never buy another CPU in your servers, blades, laptops, desktops that doesn’t have SLAT capability — you’ll be wasting your money.

Details of 4th level nesting are described in the slides from the #NotSupported VMworld presentation found on the Internet nowadays.

Datto