Nested VMs, Sky is the limit?

[lopri]

I did not know that I could install Hyper-V on VMWare Workstation - apparently you can. So I went ahead and did just that, then installed Windows 8 CP successfully.

Another small surprise is that Windows 8 also comes with Hyper-V built-in.. which means you can run VMs in Win 8 without a 3rd party software. It was a surprise because of the direction MS was heading with Win 8.

The performance is OK for testing purposes and Windows 8 installed pretty quickly in the "nested" Hyper-V. So at this point I got to wonder, is there a limit on how many layers of VMs, or hypervisors can be utilized, outside of the hardware/performance consideration? Or is it basically limitless (but practically pointless) to have a VM inside a VM inside a VM inside... ?

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Haven't heard of a limit but there probably is one at some point. You should test it out since you've already started and let us know how it goes...

 

[lopri]

Well, I ran into a problem right off the bat. I decided to try out the Win 8's Hyper-V, and while I got the Hyper-V manager but can't create a VM. I went back to the beginning and the "Hyper-V Platform" is grayed out and the message shows "A hypervisor is already running". I suspect that it's looking for a real system with VT-x/AMD-V enabled at this point. (Am I right?)

So my project to set up a Windows XP VM in a Windows 8 VM nested in Hyper-V nested in VMWare Workstation on Windows 7 has stalled for now.

 

[nehalem256]

You could try starting with VMWare ESX as the first one to add more layers of virtualization.

 

[imagoon]

ESXi5 and VMware workstation 8 will pass VT though. I have installed ESXi5 on Workstation 8, then ran 2k8r2 inside ESXi. I didn't try to run another vm on 2008r2 though since it wasn't in the scope of the testing I was doing.

 

[bico]

available memory is definitely a limit