We have been installing and testing lot of stuffs on ESXi hosts in our home lab. Providing individual hardware for each ESXi hosts in your lab is not affordable. So we arel running our ESXi hosts as a virtual machine on top of the physical ESXi host. Which is also termed as Nested ESXi. In simple terms, ESXi hosts running as a virtual machine on top of ESXi host is called as Nested ESXi host. We are running the Nested ESXi host from long time and missing part is VMware tools for Nested ESXi host. VMware has released a new fling which provides the VIB that you can install as a VMware tools on Nested ESXi host.
What is the Purpose of Installing VMware Tools on Nested ESX ?
- VMware Tools for Nested ESXi provides Guest os information (IP ,Host name, etc) of the nested ESXi hypervisor
- VMware tools allows your Nested ESXi VM to be cleanly restarted or shutdown when performing power operations
- VMware tools supports Guest Operations API
- VMware Tools executes scripts that help automate ESXi guest OS operations when the guest’s power state changes.
Installation Procedure
1. Download the VMware Tools for Nested ESXi
2. Upload the VIB file “esx-tools-for-esxi-9.7.0-0.0.00000.i386.vib” into your Nested ESXi host datastore
3.Install the VIB on the Nested ESXi host using the below command
esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/[DATASTORE]/esx-tools-for-esxi-9.7.0-0.0.00000.i386.vib -f
4. Reboot your Nested ESXi host manually or using the below command after the VMware tools installation
esxcli system shutdown reboot -r “Reboot for VMware Tools Installation”
5. After the VMware tools is successfully installed on your Nested ESXi VM, you will be able to see the status of the VMware tools is Running(Current) and also it displays the Guest OS information
6. To uninstall the VMware Tools VIB, execute the below command
esxcli software vib remove -n esx-tools-for-esxi
Thats it. I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for Reading !!!!. Please share it in Social media if you feel worth sharing it .