I’ve been doing recently VMware ESXi deployment in my lab environment and would like to share main steps required to make it work on nested Hyper-V. Needless to say, nested virtualization works great only for demo and labs, therefore, running ESXi under Hyper-V is a completely unsupported in production environments.
Anyway, carry out the following steps to install ESXi (6.0, in my case. although these steps should work for newer versions as well):
1. Download VMWare ESXi offline bundle available at product download page (e.g. ESXi6.0). You can also download a ESXi image customized by vendor. For example, here is a direct download link for Dell’s ESXi 6.0 image which includes Dell’s VIBs in addition to built-in installation bundles provided by VMware.
2. Download the driver which allows running ESXi as a VM under Microsoft Hyper-V (net-tulip, it’s actually a network driver which should be added to ESXi image. Otherwise, ESXi installation will be blocked)
3. Copy the downloaded files to the same folder (e.g. ‘D:\Images\VMware ESXi 6\’). It’ll be used as a work folder.
4. Download and install VMware PowerCLI 6.3 or newer
5. Once PowerCLI is installed, run it and set location to the folder containing the files, then add offline depot ZIP files to the current PowerCLI session as shown below:
cd 'D:\Images\VMware ESXi 6\'
Add-EsxSoftwareDepot .\esxi60_bundle.zip
Add-EsxSoftwareDepot .\net-tulip-1.1.15-1-offline_bundle.zip
6. Retrieve the name of the standard image profile and note it (it’ll will be used as a clone for a new profile):
Get-EsxImageProfile|ft Name
7. Create a new image profile by cloning existing profile which name you just noted, and then add the driver’s package to the profile:
#Create a new image profile
New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile ESXi-6.0.0-2494585 -Name rlevchenko.com -Vendor custom
#Add custom packages
Add-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile rlevchenko.com -SoftwarePackage net-tulip -Force
If AcceptanceLevel is set to PartnerSupported by default (as in the picture above) and custom packages which you are going to add to the image profile have Community acceptance level, you will receive an error during creating an ESXi ISO and it’s installation . To resolve this, set the acceptance level of the image profile to CommunitySupported by running the following command: Set-EsxImageProfile -AcceptanceLevel CommunitySupported –ImageProfile rlevchenko.com
8. Now it’s time to create an ISO from the customized ESXi image.To do this, run the following command:
Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile rlevchenko.com -FilePath D:\Images\esxi60_custom.iso -ExportToIso -Force
Create a new VM with the following settings:
A sample of VM’s configuration is shown below:
9. Once you finished to configure a VM, enable virtualization extensions on the VM’s CPU. Optionally, you can download a script available at github to check VM’s configuration and enable nested virtualization. Both options are allowed:
#Option 1
Set-VMProcessor -VMName "vHost-01" -ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $True
#Option2
.\Enable-NestedVM.ps1 -vmName "vHost-01"
10. Turn on the VM, attach the created ESXi ISO and press TAB on the boot screen, then type ignoreHeadless=TRUE and press Enter. Otherwise, ESXi boot will hang while booting (I assume it’s all because ESXi is running on non-HCL hardware. VM is a bit out of the HCL list..).
11. Complete ESXi installation process (as usual), reboot it and press SHIFT+O during the startup, and then enable ignoreHeadless option again as shown in the screenshot:
Once ESXi is successfully started, define settings for management network, enable a Shell, and then press Alt+F1 to enter to a console. We need to set a VMKernel boot-time parameter. Otherwise, you will always need to enable ignoreHeadless after every reboot.
Provide root credentials and type esxcfg-advcfg -k TRUE ignoreHeadless
Close the console by pressing ALT+F2, reboot ESXi and verify that it starts up seamlessly.
That’s it. Now you have a ESXi host running on a Hyper-V VM.
Until then,
enjoy your day :)!
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UseIT | Roman Levchenko 