After publishing my Nested ESXi enhancements for vSphere 6.5 article, I had received a number of questions on whether the new Virtual NVMe (vNVMe) capability introduced in the upcoming vSphere 6.5 release would also work with a Nested ESXi VM? The answer is yes, similiar to PVSCSI and VMXNET3, we also have an NVMe driver for ESXi running in VM. Disclaimer: Nested […]
Nested ESXi Enhancements in vSphere 6.5
As many of you have probably heard by now, vSphere 6.5 was just announced at VMworld Barcelona this week and it is packed with a ton of new features and capabilities which you can read more about here. One area that is near and dear to me and has not been covered are some of […]
VM serial logging to the rescue for capturing Nested ESXi PSOD
I frequently deploy pre-releases of our software to help test and provide early feedback to our Engineering teams. One piece of software that I deploy some what frequently is our ESXi Hypervisor and the best way to deploy it, is of course inside of a Virtual Machine or commonly referred to as Nested ESXi. Most recently while testing a new ESXi build […]
vSphere 6.0 Update 2 hints at Nested ESXi support for Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) in the future
Although Nested ESXi (running ESXi in a Virtual Machine) is not officially supported today, VMware Engineering continues to enhance this widely used feature by making it faster, more reliable and easier to consume for our customers. I still remember that it was not too long ago that if you wanted to run Nested ESXi, several non-trivial and manual tweaks to the VM’s VMX […]
Deploying Nested ESXi is even easier now with the ESXi Virtual Appliance
Several months back I had built an ESXi Virtual Appliance that allows anyone to quickly stand up a fully functional Nested ESXi VM which includes guest customization such as networking, NTP, syslog, passwords, etc. The virtual appliance was initially built for my own personal use as I found myself constantly rebuilding my lab environment for evaluating and breaking new […]