The answer is yes, yes, and yes!
A dream come true!
Until today, Windows server Hyper-V could only run Virtual Machines when Hyper-V is enabled and running on physical hardware.
However, this is going to be changed starting with Windows Server 2016 or greater.
Hyper-V Nested Virtualization
Microsoft just announced at Microsoft Build Conference this week that Windows Server vNext Hyper-V will support nested Virtualization, this news was actually broken by my fellow Hyper-V MVP Ronald Beekelaar who attended this great session in San Francisco, the session was about Windows Containers by Taylor Brown and Mathew John (Hyper-V PMs), this great news will give us the ability to run a virtual machine within another virtual machine, which means you can install and enable Hyper-V inside a virtual machine. This is fantastic!
Hyper-V Containers running inside a virtual machine that requires Hyper-V (Source: Microsoft #Build2015 Session – Windows Containers: What, Why, and How).
As you can see in the figure above, in order to run a Hyper-V Container inside a virtual machine, this requires Hyper-V to be present inside the virtual machine, because Hyper-V requires virtualization extensions to be present both on the physical or in the virtual machine that implies that if you are running Hyper-V containers in a virtual machine, then the underlying virtualization platform needs to support nested virtualization that exposes into the virtual machine.
Now with nested Virtualization support, you can run Hyper-V inside a virtual machine and build a mini Data Center demo and lab environment on your notebook, creating Hyper-V Clusters, and so on.
This is a great feature for everyone who likes to do demos on Hyper-V.
There are a lot of questions about performance impact and production support, no news at this point in time, we need to wait and see.
Thank you, Microsoft for listening to us!!!
Stay tuned for more news to come in the near future…
Make sure to check my recent Windows Server Hyper-V Cookbook for in-depth details about Hyper-V!
Until then… Enjoy your day!
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Thank you for reading my blog.
If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment.
-Charbel Nemnom-
