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We run Openstack with KVM as hypervisor and now need to run ESXi 6 or 7 inside a VM (nested virtualization). This is mainly for converting disks to proper vmdk disks, not really running any VMs under ESXi (that is why we are not using a barebone and run esxi as hv)

We run this very same setup under Proxmox without bigger issues, the main point was using the vmxnet driver for the NIX. That is exactly where we fail with Openstack. It seems there is no such driver, using e1000 does not working. Booting the installation iso leads to 'no nic found' in the very end.

We are using Openstack Xena with Debian-Buster as compute (running libvirt) on kernel 5.10/5.14.

Any hints how to get this up and running?

Eugen Mayer
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  • I have found https://github.com/virt-lightning/esxi-cloud-images which assumes that this is working, but it is not clear that 7.x is working. The issue is, downloading the 6.x iso does no longer work on VMwares website – Eugen Mayer Nov 11 '21 at 08:39
  • I could get it working using the esxi-cloud-image installer using 6.5. It seems to not be possible to install on OpenStack via the iso while using e1000 - installing on my local libvirt (arch) seems to work. Importing the qcow then also works on openstack. – Eugen Mayer Nov 11 '21 at 09:19

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Using https://github.com/virt-lightning/esxi-cloud-images i managed to get it working for 6.5/6.7 but not 7.0.

One seems to not be able to install ESXi via ISO on the an OpenStack instance itself (directly), since no matter if you use e1000 (6.x) or e1000e (7.x) for the installation, the installer will not be able to find the NIC during the installation. Also for the 6.x installer under Openstack, it could not find any disks (with or without the SATA flag).

Instead, I used the repo above to build an pre-installed esxi images shipped via qcow - it is build on my local machine and thus my local libvirt. Not sure yet why this makes a huge difference, maybe the nova based abstraction or something else hinders Openstack (no verification yet).

Building the 6.5/6.7 based qcow2 image locally, importing it via glance (ensure you use e1000 for 6.x and e1000e for 7.x) and then creating a new instance.

This will get you up and running on 6.5/6.7 with proper DHCP and network configuration. For 7.x the interface is detected, but somehow DHCP is not working. I tried with q35 and different other options, but could not get 7.x to work until know.

I created a fork at https://github.com/EugenMayer/esxi-cloud-images to

  • proper expose credentials one can login
  • remove ansible zuul usere with a predefined public key by the author
  • cleanup the readme
Eugen Mayer
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