Nested Labs: Upgrading Nested ESXi Hosts

I use nested hosts for just about all of my testing, whether in my homelab or when kicking the tyres on something in my VMware corporate lab.

One thing that used to frustrate me no end was that my VCF ESXi upgrades (especially from ESXi 6.7 to ESXi 7.0) would regularly fail. At first I thought it was something inherent to the spec of the nested VM, or that nested VMs were just not well suited to the use case, but after endless digging and exploration I found my culprit. A simple setting in vSphere HA was causing the Nested Hosts to reset during the ESXi upgrade process!

I found that if I changed the ‘VM Monitoring’ setting in vSphere HA to ‘Disabled’ all of my upgrades work seamlessly.

Result looks like this

Not saying you would want to do this in a production environment, but in a lab environment (where let’s face it, is where most nested ESXi hosts run) this does the trick.

Hope it helps one of you!