Vmware Nested within Proxmox Hypervisor

1 Login to PVE terminal or via SSH or web gui - Shell
Note: Microsoft Hyper-V nested hypervisor only works with Intel CPUs.

Usually it works for
AMD CPU or very recent Intel one
Use kernel - 3.10 *Is always the case in Proxmox VE 4.x
Enable nested support
3 To check if nested virtualization is enabled, bring up terminal/SSH/Shell, execute following command

cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nested
If it returns “N”, that means it’s disabled

To enable

# Intel
# AMD
Then

modprobe -r kvm_intel
modprobe kvm_intel
Note: If error returns, just reboot the PVE host

Check again

cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nested
We should get “Y” which means nested virtualization is enabled

Hard Disk Tab
Bus/Device: SATA
SSD emulation: Check
Discard: Check

CPU Tab
Cores: At least 2, 4 will be better *Only if our physical CPU has enough cores
Type: host or Default kvm64
Enable NUMA: Check if our system supports

Memory Tab
Memory: 4096 At least 4096, but to test all features 8192 – 16384 MiB will be better, that is 8G – 16G
Ballooning Device: Uncheck

Network Tab
Model: Intel E1000 or VMware vmxnet3

[bogavante]

Thank you so much! I was struggling for days with this and with your video I got it done in minutes.

[mblackonline]

William - thanks so much for making this video. I'm in school at WGU and studying cloud computing. I want to learn more about virtualization, so I planned to install ESXI on an old computer that I've upgraded/repurposed for a homelab. The computer has an older intel 0HM9JY NIC, and I could not get ESXI 7.0 to install on the system (despite trying various workarounds with creating customized ISOs with the required igb network driver). This method worked perfectly to allow me to install ESXI 7.0 inside of Proxmox... which is also a bonus - because I wanted to learn about Proxmox as well. :-) I've subscribed to your channel and will be checking out some of your other videos. Take care!

[rhoninpowers]

Hope your back is better now....thanks for information sharing.

[mandeepmails]

Amazing content and Nice channel. Earned my sub. 👍
Hoping you're healthy now.

A brief, i'm almost new to Proxmox. Before watching this i had a generic Question - Do we need to create a vmfs partition to run Nested ESXI ? or how to go about it...I guess it must be few of the proxmox gotcha's that i need to keep in mind. Changing the HDD from IDE to SATA did the trick.

Thanks so much.

[howtoinvestyourself]

DO you have an updated Nested video for Nesting ESXi on Promox 7.4 or 8.0 or 8.1?

[learnerit]

Nice hands-on experiment! How is the actual performance rate? Proxmox is said to be 1% of resource overhead, so even if it's nested, the performance might not be so low. Did it work smoothly?

[scottxiong]

Is this more ideal than promox nested in VMware ESXi?

[charlykjoseph]

can you please help me or any one else face this issue . I have tried it with different versions of esxi

[charlykjoseph]

Thanks for the video, I face an issue after installation, when login to browser console it shows failed to load Host summary, I have tried with different browser. but none of them worked

[kazawanonimus]

omg that sound, dude please. that volume kill me and everyone around