Unraid with VMware ESXi 7.0u3 and VMWare EVC for lab

[mavrrick]

So i have had my Unraid setup for a while. I like how it works and until recently was using it on some rather conservative hardware.

 

Not long ago I was advised my job is changing and found a need to get much more familiar with the VMware Suite of products. I have also decided to start using my server for to host my home desktop. So after 10 years of rather that conservative hardware i have upgraded to a Ryzen 5950x, 128 Gb of ram and a Asus ROG Strix MB. Basically i built the highest setup i could without going server or workstation hardware.

 

So far it has been working well. I just needed ot disable Global C-States for the video card for the desktop vm to work well. 

 

Now I have started to nest VMWare ESXi under Unraid to enable me to create my home lab with the VMWare suite of products. I have done well with getting the Hypervisor working and setting up some VM's. I have also managed to get VSphere loaded under it with some of the other products. But as soon as i went to enable VSphere DRS or HA functionality I am getting messages saying VMWare EVC is not supported. 

 

This appears to be related to certain CPU functions not working through KVM QEMU that is used with Unraid. I have tried adjusting some of the CPU feature settings for the ESXi Hosts, but have not been successful as of yet. I have confirmed that these functions are available by the hardware by doing a quick install of ESXi on the host at the bare metal level to test. 

 

I could rework my setup to load Unraid under ESXi, but i tried that early on and there are reasons I didn't go that route.  Any suggestions about how to get this functionality from Unraid VM features. 

Edited March 15, 2022 by mavrrick