The vCloud Air 200$ signup credits was nice because it helped me play with the On-demand virtual private cloud subscription. vCloud air is quite powerful and the UI is quite responsive. The waiting times increase when you use the vCloud Director UI because of the automation hooks in the back that need to get updated.
One thing I tried to do is deploy an ESXi ISO in my catalog and tried to deploy a nested hypervisor. This however failed because VT was not enabled in the virtual machine BIOS.
I tried my best to access the BIOS but I just couldn’t. So how do we get vCloud air to deploy a nested hypervisor and build a lab? Simple deploy a prebuilt appliance 🙂
I used my VMware Fusion and built a virtual machine (no OS) with VT enabled in the BIOS. I exported it as a OVA and imported that to my vCloud Air catalog. I then attached the ESXi ISO from my ISO catalog and viola! – nested ESXi hypervisor in vCloud Air.
For your convenience I have the OVA attached here. Just download and upload it to your vCloud Air catalog –> attach the ESXi OVA –> Power on and install and deploy nested VMs!
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