Nested Lab - Intel VT-x issues

[Moif_Murphy]

Hello,

I'm trying to install a lab at work on our 5.1 production vCenter for VCP study and I'm following this excellent article: http://boerlowie.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/building-the-ultimate-vsphere-lab-part-1-the-story/

All has gone well until I tried to fire up the Windows2008R2 base image via VMware Workstation 9. I'm getting the following message:

However, the host is definitely a 64bit VM:

And the hardware is most definitely 64bit as this is our production environment. VM Machine version is 8 as per the instructions.

I've tried adjusting the Virtualisation Engine options to Intel VT-x on both the Workstation 9 options and on the host VM itself but I'm not getting anywhere. Am I trying to achieve something not possible here? Is it one virtual layer too many?

Thanks

[a_p_]

Take a look at Running Nested VMs to see what's required to run nested virtual systems on an ESXi host, but keep in mind that this is neither recommended nor supported on production systems!

André

PS: Discussion moved from vSphere Upgrade & Install to Nested Virtualization

[Moif_Murphy]

I had just come across that KB as I finished posting here - as is the way. I've also found William Lau's write up on the same subject here: http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/08/how-to-enable-nested-esxi-other.html

However I'm now getting this message:

"To resolve CPU incompatibilities, use a cluster with Enhanced vMotion"

Which again is frustrating as our production cluster is EVC enabled for Intel Penryn.

I appreciate this is all unsupported so I might give it a few more goes and if l can't get it working then I'll just have to trump up the cash for a whitebox

[admin]

Moif Murphy wrote:

However I'm now getting this message:

"To resolve CPU incompatibilities, use a cluster with Enhanced vMotion"

Which again is frustrating as our production cluster is EVC enabled for Intel Penryn.

I'm not sure where that message is coming from, but it is true that a Penryn is incapable of supporting virtualized VT-x under ESX 5.1.  Thus, even though your E5-2690 is capable of supporting virtualized VT-x, the outer virtual machine could not be migrated to Penryn systems in the cluster if virtualized VT-x was exposed to it.

Virtualized VT-x is only available on Nehalem systems and later.

[Moif_Murphy]

Just as I suspected,

I think I kind of guessed that a little earlier on. We're in the process of phasing out our older servers so hopefully some time in the near future we'll be able to upgrade our EVC mode and play around with the nested side of things once the tech refresh is completed.

It looks like I'm buying a whitebox then. :smileycool:

[admin]

You may be able to override the EVC masks for this VM, if you don't care about vMotion compatibility.  If you'd like to try that, can you post your vmware.log file?

[Moif_Murphy]

As tempting as that is, I'll have to pass. This is our production environment and I'm not sure it would go down too well if I started changing things that could disrupt our working day!