Nested 64bit VMs on a Mac

I have just come back to the Mac world, with a purchase of a Macbook Pro. Its fully loaded with 16GB of RAM, and I am planning on using it for my practice lab for VCAP.

Once I fired it up after upgrading the RAM, I started VMware Fusion, installed ESXi 5 and a Windows 7 guest, got vSphere Client installed and started to create a Server 2008 R2 guest inside of ESX to be my vCenter Server.

Then I got this error:

Longmode is disabled for this virtual machine

I know that I have read about others using their macbook pro to run a vSphere environment, so I knew it was possible, but not sure what needed to be done.

After lots of Googling, I finally found the answer.

Virtualized HV is available for virtual hardware version 8 VMs on hosts that support Intel VT-x and EPT or AMD-V and RVI, but it cannot be selected through the user interface. To enable virtualized HV, edit the outer guest’s configuration file by hand and add the following line:

vhv.enable = TRUE 

Simple enough. So I shut down my ESXi and added the above setting in the VMX file. To do this you need to right click on the Virtual Machine and choose: Show Package Contents.

I then turned the ESXi server back on, tried again and still the same issue.

Turns out you need to add the setting before installing ESX. A quick reinstall of the server did the trick, and now I am on my way to having a very nice virtual setup on my Macbook Pro!

One note: make sure to put your ESXi Machine’s Network Adapters are in Promiscuous Mode to make sure there are no problems with internal network communication.