Recursive virtualization - Is it possible?

Question

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Virtualization: Guest in guest?

Is it possible to run a virtual machine under a virtual machine ?

I thought of this the other day. I wonder if you can measure the performance loss the deeper the VM's go. A VMware inside a Hyper-V inside a VMWare? Hmmm... inside virtualbox? — Jason Taylor, Sep 29 '11 at 17:31

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 29 '11 at 16:54

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Possibly, but not with ahrdware acceleration - the processor only has one ring 0. For the hyper-visor.

The sense of it is academic, though - it makes NO sense from an admin perspective.

answered Sep 29 '11 at 16:54

TomTom

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...but Linux kernel 3.1 is going to add this functionality. With all the problems. – mailq Sep 29 '11 at 17:02

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 29 '11 at 17:04

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esxi 4.1 can virtualize itself.

answered Sep 29 '11 at 17:04

tony roth

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As can Linux's KVM. http://avikivity.blogspot.com/2008/09/nested-svm-virtualization-for-kvm.html – sciurus Sep 29 '11 at 18:01

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 29 '11 at 17:36

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Yes it is known a nested virtualization. Here is a paper on same http://www.xen.org/files/xensummit_intel09/xensummit-nested-virt.pdf relative to Xen from Intel.

answered Sep 29 '11 at 17:36

zedman9991

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 29 '11 at 17:49

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Yes, it is possible with bare-metal hypervizors, and is very common for virtualization lab environments. Not generally recommended for production though.

http://www.vcritical.com/2009/05/vmware-esx-4-can-even-virtualize-itself/

answered Sep 29 '11 at 17:49

JakeRobinson

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 29 '11 at 17:27

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Sure. For some reason not long ago I was running QEMU as an ARM emulator inside Fedora inside VMWare Server on a Windows XP desktop.

It worked well enough.

answered Sep 29 '11 at 17:27

John

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Recursive virtualization - Is it possible?

5 Answers5