For a lab environment I'm running ESXi 5 inside of a VM running on ESXi 5.0. I've enabled the hardware virutalization feature/pass-through on the physical ESXi 5.0 host. The nested ESXi 5.0 instance boots and works perfectly fine, even with x64 VMs, except for one scenario. When I clone a 64-bit VM or template and run the customization specifications the VM gets hung/frozen and I have to "power off" the virtual ESXi instance. This happens ~8 out of 10 times, and doesn't happen at all when doing the same operation on a physical ESXi instance. I have not tried 32-bit VMs yet to see if they hang in a similar manner.
While I haven't done exhaustive testing, so far the few clones I've done with XenDesktop MCS (which don't use cust specs but does clone VMs) inside the nested ESXi 5 server haven't resulted in similar hangs. So my best guess at this point is something to do with customization specs in the nested ESXi instance is causing the hang.
Anyone running a nested ESXi 5 instance with 64-bit VMs and using customization specs w/o incident?
Derek Seaman
