Outside of this supported use case with the vSAN Witness Appliance, nested virtualization is not supported for the production environment. There is only one situation where nested virtualization is supported and that is the nested vSAN Witness appliance. Of course, running Hyper-V falls under this same type of support disclaimer.

VMware ESXi/ESX running in other third-party hypervisor solutions.VMware ESXi/ESX running in VMware ESXi/ESX.VMware ESXi/ESX running in VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion.The following configurations are technically possible when running VMware ESXi inside of other VMware hypervisor products but is not supported. This is officially noted by VMware in the KB article Support for running ESXi/ESX as a nested virtualization solution (2009916). Even running ESXi nested inside of a physical ESXi host environment is not supported. It’s not just other hypervisors outside of VMware vSphere. This allows some very interesting scenarios when using your VMware vSphere environment to host other hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V.Īn important point to make in regards to VMware vSphere is nested virtualization of other hypervisors like Hyper-V inside a vSphere VM is not a supported scenario. The hypervisor running in the VM on top of VMware vSphere ESXi server simply views the VM hardware as its physical host hardware on which it can run guest virtual machines.

This means you can run Type 1 hypervisors like VMware vSphere ESXi and Hyper-V inside of a VM on top of, in this case, VMware vSphere ESXi. When thinking about nested virtualization, we are talking about running a hypervisor inside of a hypervisor. What is Nested Virtualizationīefore diving into how to configure VMware vSphere to enable nested virtualization of Hyper-V inside of ESXi server, let’s take a look at what nested virtualization is exactly.

In this post, we will take a look at configuring nested Hyper-V VMs on a VMware ESXi Server and see how this can be configured for use in a lab or other environment. This opens up many different possibilities of testing and running hypervisors inside of VMware vSphere.Ī common use case many have found for running nested virtualization inside of VMware vSphere is running Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor for testing and learning purposes. One of the really neat things you can do with today’s hypervisors such as VMware vSphere is, you can configure nested virtualization. There are many great things you can do on top of today’s modern hypervisor systems that provide a great way to solve business problems and technical challenges.

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