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NucleusVM
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Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT is disabled for this ESX VM. You will only be able to run 32-bit nested VMs

I am trying to install ESXi v5 in VMware Workstation v8. When the virtual machine is booting, I get a warning message saying:

Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT is disabled for this ESX VM. You will only be able to run 32-bit nested VMs.

1.jpg

This is my computer’s processor:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU
950  @ 3.07GHz, 3068 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)

What must I do to make the warning go away?

Thanks

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RameshRajan
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Contributor

Thanks, Jim. I am going to follow the instruction in the links you provided here and will post an update.

By the way when i checked my ESXi VMs (Summary Tab) they say vmotion, ECV and Fault Tolerance as N/A. That's how i came to the conclusion that they were not supported unless you have VT-x/EPT. Again it was my pet peeve against Intel where you have to be very careful on the CPUs you buy as against AMD. All AMD CPUs support AMD-V with RVI.

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admin
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RameshRajan wrote:

By the way when i checked my ESXi VMs (Summary Tab) they say vmotion, ECV and Fault Tolerance as N/A. That's how i came to the conclusion that they were not supported unless you have VT-x/EPT.

These are among the many reasons that ESXi in a VM is only supported under Workstation "for educational and demonstration purposes only."  However, you can get these things to work with some effort.

Again it was my pet peeve against Intel where you have to be very careful on the CPUs you buy as against AMD. All AMD CPUs support AMD-V with RVI.

That's not quite fair.  Early AMD64 parts supported neither.  Then there were AMD64 parts that only supported AMD-V, but not RVI...and the AMD-V support had a serious design flaw.  Only since Barcelona have all AMD64 parts supported AMD-V and RVI.

Your Xeon pre-dates Intel support for EPT.  Since Nehalem, all Intel CPUs with VT-x support also support EPT.  Having said that, it is true that some Intel skus do not have VT-x support at all.

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RameshRajan
Contributor
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As per jmattson i have to take back some points i wrote earlier.

1. vmotion and storage vmotion works flawlessly even when you have nested ESxi

2. I was uanble to get Fault Tolerance working

     - My ESXi hosts are in cluster with Vsphere HA enabled

     - I have a centralized NFS data store which stores fileset of VMs

     - I received the following message which clearly points to an unsupported CPU

3. I tried to install vcenter server appliance in OVF format and failed. It points to cpu incompatibility as well.

All said I can live without Fault Tolerance. Thanks for your help j.

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manishraj
Contributor
Contributor

I m also facing the same issue as mention above.  I m using Intel Core2Duo processor. I checked in log file EPT is disable for my host.

Please see the attached log file suggest.

Thanks

Manish

Thanks Manish Raj
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admin
Immortal
Immortal

The Core 2 Duo does not have EPT support and cannot run 64-bit nested VMs.

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chanaka_ek
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

All,

Capture.JPG

I had this same problem today but it turned out that since all my VM's were created in Vmware workstation 7, HPET wasn't enabled and was the reason for this. So, while most of the comments here provide some of the correct steps to take, dont think any of them include all the steps required (assuming that your nested hypervisor VM's were NOT freshly created in Workstation 8 with the HPET support turned on (if this is on, when you go to settings and select processors, on the bottom right, you'd see 2 check boxes and the one that says "Virtualise Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI" should be available.)

So, if you power the VM off, select it in the left hand pane within the workstation, you will see on the right to  "Upgrade this virtual machine" select that, select the Hardware compatibility to Workstation 8 to enable HPET, select Alter this VM and  when you click next, you'll see the changes to apply include Adding: HPET.

Once thats done, go to the settings of the VM (while powered off) and select the processors on the left and make sure the checkbox "Virtualise Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI" is checked. And also make sure the guest OS is selected as ESXi 5 under options.

Thats all you need to do.

if this is to be done through editing the vmx file. amongst the following is the key

hpet0.present = "TRUE"

If the VM was freshly created on Workstation 8, this would be there by default (provided that you used the ESXi5 installation CD during the creation time)

Hope this makes sense. (& dont forget to award points)

ChanEK

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Actually, the HPET doesn't have to be present, but the virtual hardware version does have to be 8.  New virtual CPU features are typically tied to a new  virtual hardware version.

In the case of virtualized VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI, we didn't quite make the cut-off for virtual hardware version 8, which first appeared in ESXi 5.0, but we decided to release the feature in Workstation 8 anyway.  That's what the warning is about.  Future products will probably tie virtualized VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI to hardware version 9.  (It is possible that hardware version 8 VMs with the feature will be grandfathered in, but you won't be able to add the feature to a hardware version 8 VM that doesn't already have it.)

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baroforo
Contributor
Contributor

Hello everyone, I have  a question similar to the original post. Sorry I am am unclear on some virtualization concepts so I will try to be as clear as I can with my case.

I wanted to evaluate vCenter and I setup a vmware environment on my laptop in order to play around with vCenter and spin out some test VMs using an ESXi5 host as a datastore for this vCenter

On my physical laptop (Dell latitude e6500 - in the BIOS, virtualization is enabled on this physical laptop), I am running VM Workstation 8

I am running 2 VMs, 1st is a Win2008 R2 x64 server with the vCenter client and vCenter server installed. The 2nd is a ESXi5 hypervisor (host/datastore).

When I try to spin out a new 64 bit VM (nested VM) in the vCenter client, and then power it on,  I get the following error:

vm3.gif

on the ESXi host/datastore for the vCenter (virtual), I have VT-x/EPT enabled:

vm2.gif

I tried to check the BIOS of the ESXi, but there are no options to enable the virtualization

vm1.gif

I also updated the /etc/vmware/config (on the ESXi server) to set the vhv values to TRUE

vm5.gif

but running the esxcfg-info| grep "HV Support" I am getting a '0'

vm34.gif

So what I am unclear about is 1) how do I enable virtualization on teh ESXi 5 host, when after checking of the VM > Settings > Processors > enable Virtualize Intel VT-x.. and updating the config file I am still getting a '0' for HV Support

and 2) should I enable any other setting on the vCenter server (win2008 R2 x64), or is this related to the ESXi server only? I am not sure where the error to run the 64bit VMs is coming from, is it only from the ESXi host or is it also from the vCenter server?

I hope I explained this clearly.. Thanks!

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admin
Immortal
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It is likely that your CPU is too old to support virtualized VT-x/EPT.  You need a Core i3, Core i5, or Core i7 to use this feature.

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vBigG
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Contributor

I had a lot of trouble runing 64 bit VMs on with Workstation 7 installed Server 2008 R2 some time ago. Initially I bought a 1st Gen Core i5. Then I found out I needed both a CPU and Motherbaord/Chipset that supported Intel VT-d to run 64bit VMs. A New CPU and carefully selected motherboard later all was fine!

I'm now running workstation 8 and looking to upgrade my host machines and landed on this thread looking for info on VT-x/EPT.


Now Intel do have a couple of helpful pages the first being this one where you can search for CPUs that are support features for virtualisation including VT-x, VT-d and EPT. http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t

There's also a page on Intel Motehrbaords listing INTEL Desktop motherbaords/Chipsets that are compatible with VT and VT-d.

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-030922.htm

I can't seem to find anything similar for VT-x/EPT. This may now be included under the Intel "VT" umbrella.... but I'm not sure. But my tip for folks is the CPU feature support is only part of the puzzle. Both your Chipset AND BIOS needs to support the Intel virtualisation features and it can be very tricky trying to find out before you buy!

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admin
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vBigG wrote:

I had a lot of trouble runing 64 bit VMs on with Workstation 7 installed Server 2008 R2 some time ago. Initially I bought a 1st Gen Core i5. Then I found out I needed both a CPU and Motherbaord/Chipset that supported Intel VT-d to run 64bit VMs. A New CPU and carefully selected motherboard later all was fine!

Actually, Workstation makes no use of VT-d.

Now Intel do have a couple of helpful pages the first being this one where you can search for CPUs that are support features for virtualisation including VT-x, VT-d and EPT. http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t

Unfortunately, this web site is notoriously wrong about which CPUs have EPT support.  Currently, only the "products formerly" Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge have EPT support.

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DKamat
Contributor
Contributor

Hi jmattson,

I have the similar problem

was not able to install the Solarwind LEM in the ESXi 5.0

Thanks a lot for reply in this thread

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tandonhat
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, notoriously wrong indeed.

In my case, I have a Xeon X3220, which they clearly indicate to support both VT-x and EPT (http://ark.intel.com/products/28034/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X3220-8M-Cache-2_40-GHz-1066-MHz-FSB), but when I install ESXi 5, the message "Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT is not supported on this platform" still appears. I take that as the X3220 does not support EPT?  (Although it may support VT-x as according to the CPUZ readings)

So is there any official confirmation about this? And is there any workaround for me to install ESXi on a Workstaion 9?

This misannoucement really annoys me.

Thanks for the information anyway.

X3220.jpg

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admin
Immortal
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tandonhat wrote:

Yes, notoriously wrong indeed.

In my case, I have a Xeon X3220, which they clearly indicate to support both VT-x and EPT (http://ark.intel.com/products/28034/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X3220-8M-Cache-2_40-GHz-1066-MHz-FSB), but when I install ESXi 5, the message "Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT is not supported on this platform" still appears. I take that as the X3220 does not support EPT?  (Although it may support VT-x as according to the CPUZ readings)

The Xeon X3220 does not support EPT.  It was released well before EPT was available.

So is there any official confirmation about this? And is there any workaround for me to install ESXi on a Workstaion 9?

There is no official confirmation, but you can either read the MSRs yourself or trust the dump of the MSRs in the vmware.log file, where they are decoded for human readability.  You are looking for the line that says:

Enable EPT                     { 0 }

or

Enable EPT                     {0,1}

The latter implies EPT support; the former does not.

You can still install ESXi under Workstation 9, but you will only be able to run 32-bit nested VMs using binary translation.

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tandonhat
Contributor
Contributor

Well the application i want to deploy requires 64 bit machines so... I think I meet a dead end here. Perhaps I should start looking for new hardware

Thanks for the help, jmattson.

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mistaJ
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Contributor

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