Running Hyper-V Inside a Virtual Machine

In short: it can be done and it works!

Caveat: You need a good workstation or server…as always.

Have a look at the instructions:

Install VMware Workstation and create a VM. Make sure you don’t boot it up!

Add the following info to the *.VMX file of the new virtual machine:

mce.enable = "TRUE"
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"
vhv.enable = "TRUE"

Then boot the VM, install Windows, and you’re done!

 

Basically it probably won’t work with Hyper-V as a host, as we tried it, but VMware Workstation 8, 9, and 10 worked very well.

If you plan to host several Hyper-V VMs on VMware and add VMs inside of those, note that you’ll need a good PC to begin with. Lots of fast RAM is a must and a good stripe RAID or a super fast SSD hard drive will definitely help!

For running software tests and the like, this is quite a useful scenario. Sure some IT admins will moan it’s an unsupported scenario, but we at BackupChain like to experiment with stuff.

Innovation implies risk of failure, but we like to focus on success 😉