I worked through this previously and posted in IRC yesterday about working around running ovirt nested under VMWare. I figured i'd post it to the mail group so that it would be available in it's entirety here for future reference: The following gists explain the 3 major adjustments that have to be made currently to get nested virt under vmware working: https://gist.github.com/RabidCicada/993349b3a7eaf35637122f0122fdedb3 https://gist.github.com/RabidCicada/bc01eb0b13195faa26520c0fb666ec34 https://gist.github.com/RabidCicada/37ff6f1ed2afd8dd4edefac735536c69 https://gist.github.com/RabidCicada/40655db1582ca5d07c9bbf2c429cdd01 Hopefully it can save others the huge amount of time it took me to figure it all out. Specifically it's a problem with the --machine type at 3 major parts of the vm creation for the hosted-engine. 1) You have to fix the virt-install to use --machine pc-i440fx-rhel7.2.0 2) You have to fix the guestfish spinup of the partially configured vm to use --machine pc-i440fx-rhel7.2.0, where they edit the nic config among other things 3) You have to tell vdsm on the node to use --machine pc-i440fx-rhel7.2.0 I don't know the underlying reason why a --machine type > pc-i440fx-rhel7.2.0 breaks the system but it ends up resulting in a bios freeze. Again, Hope this helps someone. Suggested only to use for a test/dev system.