In many cases, the web GUI of the ESXi server may not be accessible and only the vSphere client may be used to manage the ESXi server. When customers want to enable hardware-assisted virtualization to improve the performance of the Routing Engine, they would have to use the vSphere client.

This article explains how to enable hardware-assisted virtualization in ESXi by using the vSphere client.

The following steps need to be performed to enable hardware-assisted virtualization in ESXi by using the vSphere client:

1. Open the vSphere client and log in to the ESXi server by using your credentials.

2. Navigate to the vSRX Virtual Machine (VM) instance and turn it off.

3. Find the datastore on which the VM is hosted.

4. Right-click the datastore and select Browse Datastore as shown in the following screenshot:

5. In the dialog box that opens, find the folder with the same name as your VM instance, as shown in the following example:

   
   

6. Find the .vmx file of your VM instance and click to download the file to your local machine. In the example, VSRX-1-10.219.93.5.vmx is the file.

7. Modify the .vmx file and add vhv.enable ="TRUE" at the end as shown below:

8. Click , upload the modified .vmx file to the same folder in the datastore, and replace the existing .vmx file.

9. Turn on the VM instance. The instance will now have hardware-assisted virtualization enabled.

Note: This feature is effective on ESXi version 5.1 and later. On vSRX15.1X49-D120 onwards, this option is selected by default when spinning the vSRX.

2019-07-27: Corrected typo in step 7.