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dcasota edited this page Feb 25, 2020 · 2 revisions

Welcome to the vesxi-on-azure-scripts wiki!

This wiki provides all information about the project.

Why are people running their stuff in a nested virtualization lab?

VMware ESXi, the cloud provider- and onpremise datacenter type-1-hypervisor for many guest OS has been established for more than fifteen years. As a VMware enthusiast simply put I love plan, do and run datacenter infrastructure. On the same side, reliability, scalability, performance for compute resources is a main topic on Microsoft Azure and its Hyper-V type-1 hypervisor, too.

If you want to go for more hypervisor software learning, and without the need to spec, order, rack, stack, cable, image and deploy hardware, nested hypervisor labs could be a useful addition, but, it is not officially supported. See

Automation&Integration engineers often use nested hypervisor labs to test their kickstart/setup/configuration scripts without the need of tests always allocating own realworld physical hardware. That said, keep in mind the operational economy radius of realworld physical hardware. It doesn't end with nested hypervisors: There is degraded value of running compute resources in a nested virtualization environment only.

Realworld physical hardware is a key point in a 'type-1 hypervisor running in a VM on top of a type-1 hypervisor' scenario. Some nested hypervisor configurations are technically possible. If you run into issues with a nested lab, give up or try to fix it on your own support.

This study work running an ESXi VM on top of Azure pursues the following goals:

  • learn back-to-the-basics in pairs. As example, if you newly learned how to create from an ISO a .vhd data disk, try to find similarities to previous achievements of making a bootable usb medium.
  • pay more attention to interoperability and capabilities history. As example, disk formats like .vhd or .vhdx (conectix/Microsoft), .vmdk or .ova (VMware) or .vdi (Oracle) offer vendor specific benefits. There is no common cloud interchange disk format, but it became easier to export a disk as different formats.
  • code Microsoft Azure VM and VMware ESXi setup or kickstart scripts step by step. Be pragmatic with findings from user interface interactions or results.
  • document the findings. The mission of this cross-type-1-hypervisor nested lab is pushing the horizon view of my own to both worlds.
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