Has anybody setup VMware ESXi with Proxmox 5.3?

[victorhooi]

Hi,

Is there an up-to-date tutorial on setting up nested VMware ESXi under Proxmox?

I found an older guide from 3 years ago (2016) - https://www.marksei.com/install-esxi-nested-inside-proxmox-ve/ - however, I'm not sure how much of it is still valid/current.

Has anybody done a recent install of VMware ESXi 6.7.0 with Proxmox?

There's a wiki article (https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Nested_Virtualization) but it has a big warning at the top that's it's a draft, and may not be accurate...

Thanks,
Victor

 

[gurubert]

I got it running with "host" as CPU type (for nested virtualization as explained in the wiki), "MegaRAID SAS 8708EM2" as SCSI controller and an e1000 virtual NIC.

 

[mir]

Is there an up-to-date tutorial on setting up nested VMware ESXi under Proxmox?

What would be the point of doing so?

 

[LnxBil]

What would be the point of doing so?

I see the point, because I have different Hypervisors on bare metal just for creating VMs on them, so I would really benefit from virtualizing them inside of PVE. If you only need the other hypervisors for testing, this is great!

 

[Neox]

I confirm this worked fine with ESXi 6.5.0 as guest inside a Proxmox v6.1.8 on my small LAB (sandy bridge, 16Go, 500Go HDD)
Activate NESTED Virtualisation as per Proxmox Wiki ( https://pve.proxmox.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=Nested+Virtualization )

Set your KVM machine with this settings :

• CPU as HOST
• BIOS =seabios
• SCSI =megaraid (if you want to use SCSI HardDrive
• HardDrive as SCSI or SATA
• NET : vmxnet3 works directly
• NET : E1000 even if ESXi says unsupported device pciinfo 8086:100e-1af4:1100 => you can keep going on (virtIO or RTL8139 give no network card at all)

ESXi-6.7 :

• fresh install : OK
• upgrade from 6.5 : works fine too with this settings (same warning as for 6.5)

ESXi-7.0 :

• fresh install looks fine with :
  • hard drive as SATA drive (but doesn't see it as VMFS available, need external hard drive or NAS)
  • only vmxnet3 network card
• upgrade from 6.7 to 7.0 doesn't work, it doesn't see SCSI Megaraid hard drive, move hard drive to SATA and it sees Hard Drive from 6.7 but thendoesn't want to finish due to some VIB not available/not compatible
  
  
• disk partitions seams to have changed from 8 partitions in ESXi6.5 or 6.7 to only 4 in ESXi7

 

[christofameye]

During installation I should be able to press F11, but that doesn't work, how dow I send that key press in the novnc console ?

 

[christofameye]

During installation I should be able to press F11, but that doesn't work, how dow I send that key press in the novnc console ?

The answer is simple: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Troubleshooting