Saturday, May 3, 2014

Nested KVM in ESXi5.5

Since I tested ESXi 5.5 for awhile, I wanted to learn something new like KVM-QEMU (which i heard they have best performance and less overhead) So, I installed them inside ubuntu guest OS, but before doing that, ESXi and guest needed to be configure to run KVM.

Here are the pre-step I took
1. Go to your guest and upgrade hardware version to at least 9 (Well, It's on ESXi 5.5 so I upgraded my guest's hardware version to 10.
2. Since hardware version 10 not allow you to edit the setting with vSphere Client (that's bad), you need vSphere web client to do so.
3. Before edit guest's configuration, ssh to your ESXi host and add this line to /etc/vmware/config

vhv.enable = "TRUE"

4. Edit the guest's setting with vSphere web client, go to "Virtual Hardware" > under CPU option


5. After all this done, check the kvm compatible by install cpu-checker inside ubuntu

#sudo apt-get install cpu-checker
#sudo /usr/sbin/kvm-ok

If there's an output saying something like KVM acceleration can be used, then we're good to go.