VirtualBox and VMware Workstation (and VMware Player) are "level 2 hypervisors." Hyper-V and VMware ESXi are "level 1 hypervisors."
The main difference is that a level 2 hypervisor is an application running inside an existing OS, while a level 1 hypervisor is the OS itself.
This means that when you enable Hyper-V, your Windows 10 "host" becomes a virtual machine. A special one, but nonetheless a virtual machine.
So your question would more aptly be: "Why don't VirtualBox and VMware Workstation work inside a Hyper-V virtual machine?" One can answer because as a VM, the Intel VT-X instruction are no longer accessible from your virtual machine, only the host has access to it.
QEMU works because it does not do virtualization but emulation, which is completely different and explains why QEMU is painfully slow. Virtualization is the process of running a complete isolated machine inside another, but with the help of the processor. This requires the virtual machine and the host to be instruction compatible.
Emulation is the process of running any machine inside a running OS, there is no platform restriction, and is why QEMU can run an ARM machine on an amd64 platform.
Note: QEMU has 2 operating modes:
- it can work as an emulator, this is the mode explained above
- it can work as virtualization software with the help of KVM if the guest architecture is compatible with the host's and if the VT instruction is present of course.
2Hyper-V does not support nested virtualization (with hardware acceleration). However, it will not crash under normal circumstances. VirtualBox would complain that it cannot run x64 guests and that’s it. So something else is wrong like a malfunctioning device driver or whatever. – Daniel B – 2017-05-13T15:37:09.417
I see, it does indeed crash. However, again: This is not normal. A crash is never normal. It appears this is a bug in Hyper-V. You should probably get in touch with Microsoft about it. – Daniel B – 2017-05-13T17:51:48.040
Worth pointing out that QEMU isn't a hypervisor. Hyper-V does support nested virtualization.
– Ramhound – 2017-05-13T19:09:06.260