Nested ESXi on the Cloudhelix vCloud Platform

An ESXi 5.5 U1 template and the vCenter 5.5 U1b appliance are now available in the Cloudhelix Public Catalog.

Nested ESXi isn’t officially supported by VMware, so why would you want these, you ask? Reasons can vary?—?from a demo lab, to simply because you think it’s cool.

You could of course build your own ESXi image, but the pre-built version has the following changes integrated:

VMware Tools installed
‘Expose hardware-assisted CPU virtualization to guest OS’ ticked (that’s right, we have saved you the trouble of ticking a box…)
Guest OS correctly set to VMware ESXi 5.x
Advanced ESXi setting FollowHardwareMac set to automatically update the VMKernel’s mac-address when cloned
System UUID deleted from /etc/vmware/esx.conf to ensure the generation of a new UUID on first boot
Naturally, the templates are unlicensed, so will operate in Evaluation Mode unless you choose to licence them.

If you require network connectivity for a nested VM outside of its nested host and do not have a dedicated platform, please contact Support as we will need to make a change to your vDS port-group.

If you would like more information on building your own nested ESXi hosts, I’d recommend that you check out William Lam’s excellent series of blog posts found here: http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/nested-virtualization