ESXi 6.7 as a VM in Workstation 15 lab environment - hardware sensors

[techdatasystems]

I'm in the process of building out a replacement training lab based on ESXi 6.7 and the VCSA 6.7 running as VM's under Workstation 15. This is a replacement for a VSphere 5.5 based lab.

Issue is I'm running my ESXi hosts as virtual machines under VMware Workstation 15. This is a lab environment for training, and we're upgrading from ESXi 5.5 to ESXi 6.7. In our ESXi 5.5 lab, which had the ESXi VM's running under VMware Workstation 14, the WIndows VSphere Client would display Hardware Sensor Data for the virtualized ESXi hosts.

Unfortunately, in the newly built ESXi 6.7 VM's running under VMware Workstation 15, the ESXi Web UI under "Monitor" --> "Hardware" --> "System Sensors" I'm seeing the following error:

This system has no IPMI capabilities, you may need to install a driver to enable sensor data to be retrieved.

I did have some issues getting the sfcbd-watchdog service started, which I managed to workaround on the DCUI console by issuing the "esxcli set --enable true" command and then starting the service. I'm not sure of this results in the service surviving a reboot (seems possibly not). But even with the service running, I'm not getting any hardware sensor data, which I did in VSphere 5.5.

Is there some sort of driver (VIB ??) I need to install oin the virtualized ESXi 6.7 hosts to enable hardware monitoring? I don't recall having to do this in the 5.5 setup.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Raj1988]

Please understand CIM from Hardware Monitoring in ESXi - VMware Support Insider  .

What you are trying to achieve is not possible. Get a VMware HCL supported hardware and install ESXi and everything should be working fine .

Regards,

AJ

[techdatasystems]

I understand what you are saying the the purpose behind CIM. Curious then why this worked in ESXi 5.5. And while I'm not working with real hardware here, running ESXi as a VM in VMware Workstation for Lab and Training purposes is a supported environment (or at least it used to be). Thanks in advance.

[daphnissov]

Running ESXi in a nested environment has never, ever been a supported configuration, regardless of where you've seen it used.

[techdatasystems]

I stand corrected:

VMware Knowledge Base

That said, at this point I'm probably going to just reference the point that we're not running on physical, supported hardware and move on. It's just odd that I could see Hardware Sensor Data on nested ESXi 5.5 hosts using the legacy Windows VSphere Client, but the same could not be said for nested ESXi 6.7 hosts using the Web Client.

Thanks for the feedback...