Another question that cropped up at last week Manchester/North-West VMUG was whether there were any limits to Nested ESX and vINCEPTION levels. As you might know physical ESXi (pESX) has the ability to run VMware ESXi inside a VM (vESX). This is often referred to as “nested ESX” or something I like to call “vINCEPTION”. It’s a pun on the movie where there a dreams, and dreams within dreams and dreams within dreams within dreams. Typically, vINCEPTION is used to run a homelab on PC grade equipment; The VMworld Hands-on Labs and it can also be useful for running “beta” version of the platform when you don’t have enough kit to spare to run what’s on the truck, and what’s coming on the truck.
Anyway, last week I was asked if you could run another instance of ESX within the vESX (the dream within a dream). The answer is yes you can. I contact me colleague William Lam. He actually demo’d # levels of vINCEPTION using vSphere 5.1 at the BrownBag sessions at VMworld 2012:
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/09/vinception-notsupported-slides-posted.html
Personally, I think that vVESX (I know this is getting silly isn’t) is largely of theoretical interests – I don’t see a strong use case for it and I would interested/surprised to hear one… plus one has to wonder that if you do excessive nesting all you would get is increased chances of poor performance.