Issues with nested VM's, EPT, 4.1 nested in 5.1

[runesan]

Good evening,

I am having an issue getting hardware passthrough to work. I am running ESXi 5.1 (free license) and trying to nest 4.1 (free license) inside it. In the 4.1 settings, I have tried setting the EPT / RVI setting to hardware/hardware, as well as Automatic. Both result in the following message:

Warning message on ESXi 4.1: Virtualized Intel

VT-x/EPT is disabled for this ESX virtual machine.

You will only be able to run 32-bit nested virtual

machines.

I have heard all sorts of things to get this working. This ranges from manually editing the VMX file (tried), to locking the memory (tried), to setting the EPT setting to Automatic rather than setting it manually (tried). All result in the same above message. EPT is enabled in the BIOS and EPT is most definitely doable on this processor (E5-2650). Any ideas to get this working? If you need logs, can you tell me where to get them? (I see other threads request vmware.log but the only dump I get from the vSphere Client is huge and made up of a gzip file and individuals in a folder)

The ESXi 4.1 VM under Network adapters says that DirectPath I/O is not supported and one of the reasons it lists is that the host is not configured for it. I know it is experimental but hopefully something can be figured out for this.

Thanks for the help!

Sincerely,

Cody Weaver

[a_p_]

Discussion moved from VMware ESXi 5 to Nested Virtualization

[admin · Accepted solution]

Using the web client, check the box next to "virtualize hardware-assisted virtualization", or edit the vmx file to add:

vhv.enable = TRUE

Note that the virtual hardware version must be 9.

[runesan]

I performed an upgrade on the ESXi 4.1 VM to bring it to version 9, but if I power it on and look at Advanced Settings on that VM's VSphere client, under advanced features and VMDirectPath, it still shows "Host does not support passthrough configuration". So a problem still exists somewhere, even though the error message on startup is gone.

[admin]

VMDirectPath (VT-d) should not be relevant.  The checkbox for enabling virtualized hardware-assisted virtualization  (VT-x/EPT) is only available through the web client, not through the old viClient.

[runesan]

However the caveat of that is that the web client is an attachment of vCenter Server correct? And vCenter server is not freely available, but rather is one of the licensable features of VMWare? Also correct?

[admin]

runesan wrote:

However the caveat of that is that the web client is an attachment of vCenter Server correct? And vCenter server is not freely available, but rather is one of the licensable features of VMWare? Also correct?

I don't know.  You may be right.  The alternative to the web client is to manually edit the .vmx file for your ESX 4.1 VM and add:

vhv.enable = TRUE

That will enable virtualized VT-x/EPT for your ESXi 4.1 guest, so that you can run 64-bit nested VMs.

[runesan]

This is correct, my vmx file was already edited. It turns out I was looking at the wrong place for my information on passthrough. Everything is working now as it should. Thank you for your help everybody! In my case, I just needed to upgrade the 4.1 VM to Hardware Version 9