As part of setting up labs on a Nutanix infrastructure, you may be required to deploy a hypervisor (ESXi, Promox, Hyper-V, etc.) on the AHV hypervisor (Inception!).

You will then be confronted with this type of error message when installing ESXi for example (the form differs for other hypervisors, but the substance remains the same):

The processor will not be detected as having virtualization capabilities and you will therefore not be able to deploy a hypervisor… But it is possible to bypass this restriction.

Nutanix AHV: bypass processor restriction

I assume that the virtual machine on which you want to deploy a hypervisor is already created.

To bypass the processor restriction, we must connect to one of the CVMs in our cluster and modify our virtual machine with the acli vm.update command and the “cpu_passthrough” parameter:

acli vm.update VM_NAME cpu_passthrough=true

You will get the following message:

nutanix@NTNX-a64e778d-A-CVM:192.168.2.241:~$ acli vm.update VM_NAME cpu_passthrough=true
VM_NAME: pending
VM_NAME: complete

Please note, this command will only work if your virtual machine is turned off.

Once the command is applied you can restart your installation… Except for ESXi which still requires a little subtlety!

Nutanix AHV: truncate NIC type to install ESXi

To install an ESXi nested on Nutanix AHV and have it be fully functional, you also need to modify the network adapters to make it think they are e1000 type.

To do this, with the virtual machine still off, connect to one of the CVMs, and type the following command:

acli vm.nic_create VM_NAME network=NETWORK_NAME model=e1000

Be sure to replace VM_NAME with the name of the virtual machine concerned, and NETWORK_NAME with one of the networks previously created on your Nutanix cluster. You will get the following message:

nutanix@NTNX-a64e778d-A-CVM:192.168.2.241:~$ acli vm.nic_create VM_NAME network=NETWORK_NAME model=e1000
NicCreate: pending
NicCreate: complete

You can now restart the installation of your hypervisor.