How to Install 32 / 64 bit Operating System on Nested vSphere 6.7

VMware vSphere 6.7 has been announced by VMware recently and there are many enhancement and new features are available with this release.Most of the VMware engineers and admins will do their tests on Nested virtual environment , As we ll know VMware supports nested virtualization . With vSphere 6.7 also it supports , In this post i will share how can we install or what modification we have to do after creating a nested VMware 6.7 environment to install 2 32 bit and 64 bit OS top of that .

First I will share details about about my environment , my nested setup is running on top of  a HP ProLiant BL460 G7 Server , below table will have the configuration details .Since HP G7 is not supporting the 6.7 version I choose the base esxi on 6.0 U3 and Nested ESXi are on vSphere 6.7 . Also Storage is VSAN datastore created on this nested setup.

Server Type	CPU	CORE	Logical CPU	RAM	ESXi Version
Physical	2	12	24	64 GB	6.0 U3
Nested	2	2	4	10	6.7
Nested	2	2	4	10	6.7
Nested	2	2	4	10	6.7
Nested	2	2	4	16	6.7

I created a 32 bit windows 2008 R2 machine on one of the Nested ESXi server with configuration of 1 CPU , 2 GB RAM , and 20 GB HDD

To install OS on the machine i powered on the VM and got the below error . As per the error i understand that , this issue is related my nested ESXi CPU feature . Since it is nested by default the hardware virtualization won’t be  there , but what we can enable the virtualization feature on the CPU of nested ESXi and resolve this issue .

Let’s check the virtualization supported feature enabled on the windows 2008 VM and the Nested ESXi . It is not mandatory to enable the feature the VM but it should be enabled on nested ESXi .

Edit Settings -> CPU -> Hardware Virtualization  , you can see it is not enabled on both .

Enable the Feature on the nested ESXi and power on the VM  , note that to enable the feature  down time required ( shutdown the nested ESXi) .

Shutdown the nested ESXi 

Edit Settings -> CPU -> Hardware Virtualization – > add the tick on Check box of Hardware Virtualization Option and Power on .

You can verify from that same from option and you can find configuration same like below on that feature .

Try to Power on the VM and install Operating system  . Also you can notice that VM hardware compatibility is ESXi 6.0 and later and virtual machine hardware version is 11 . Because I tried to create a VM first time with supported version of base ESXi seerver .

Also I have create new 64 bit windows 7 VM to test 64 bit compatibility on nested vSphere 6.7 and it worked

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