Tag Archives: nested hypervisors

Using KVM on top of ESXi

Leave a reply

KVM and VMware

I’ve been playing with SDN, VMs etc. in a lab. Given that I don’t have a load of servers lying around I tend to use VMs (so nested virtualisation) on ESXi. As I learned the hard way there are a few little details you have to watch if you want to use the KVM hypervisor.

ESXi5.1 (or later)

Virtualized HV is fully supported for virtual hardware version 9 VMs on hosts that support  Intel VT-x and EPT or AMD-V and RVI.

Virtual Hardware

Something I learned the hard way was that the VMs I created have virtual hardware VM version 8 by default. This was the default under ESXi 5.0 and doesn’t support virtualised HVs. Using the Web Client stop the VM and upgrade the hardware to VM Version 9 (or later)

vm-hardware-upgrade

vSphere Web Client – Exposing Hardware Virtualisation

With vSphere 5.1 you cannot create a new VM in the Windows vSphere client and allow the virtualization features of the processor to be presented.  So you will want to use the web client to create the shell not the windows client. This seems to be the way it will stay going forward – only the web client will have all the features shown.

Check the ‘Expose hardware virtualisation to Guest OS’ box under the CPU settings.

webClient_virtual_hardwareAnd that should do it – your Guest OS will now be able to run KVM hypervisor (or any other one of your choice)