Error "This type of vm is not supported when software memory tiering is enabled" is shown when powering on a virtual machine.
Article ID: 398302
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
After configuring memory tiering in a vSphere environment, powering on a VM results in the following error:
This type of VM is not supported when software memory tiering is enabled. Failed to start the virtual machine.
Module MemSchedEarly power on failed. An error occurred while parsing scheduler specific configuration parameters.
Environment
ESXi 9.0 hosts and ESXi 9.1 hosts using memory tiering.
Cause
In ESX 9.0 and earlier, there are several virtual machine parameters that are disallowed when running on a host with memory tiering enabled. This causes the VM to fail reporting the error, This type of vm is not supported when software memory tiering is enabled.
Refer to the table below for a list of unsupported settings
| VM Profile | VMX Options |
Low latency VM | sched.cpu.latencySensitivity = "high" |
Security VM | SEV VM: sev.enable = "True" SGX VM: sgxInfo.epcSize is non-zero TDX VM: tdx.enable = "True" |
Fault Tolerant VM | ftcpt.enabled = "True" |
Monster VM | VMs with more than 1 TB Memory and 128 vCPUs |
Nested Virtualization VM | vhv.enable = "True" |
Resolution
To work around the error in ESX 9.0 and earlier, change or disable the unsupported parameters on the virtual machine.
To resolve the error, upgrade to ESX 9.1.
The following VM types are now supported to run on a physical 9.1 ESX host with Memory Tiering enabled but will still be disabled from participating in memory tiering.
- Low Latency VM
- Security VMs
- ftCP VMs
- Monster VMs
- Nested VMs
Note: With Nested VMs, the only exception is VBS (Virtualization Based Security) VMs. VBS VMs can participate in memory tiering using a VMX parameter.
By default, Memory Tiering is disabled for a Nested Virtualization VM.
The vmx option sched.mem.enableNestedTiering can be set to TRUE to enable Memory Tiering for Nested VMs.
Before enabling Memory Tiering support for VBS VMs, review and test the nature of workloads that need to run in these VMs.
Customers are advised to follow the same guidelines as for a normal memory tiering deployment as listed in the section "Using and monitoring Memory Tiering" in the performance white paper, Memory Tiering Performance.
Broadcom does not support running nested hypervisors within a virtual machine on VMware vSphere ESX. See KB, Support for running ESXi as a nested virtualization solution.
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