Nested Virtualization on Hyper-V is FINALLY Here!!

Earlier this Spring 2015, it was announced that the Hyper-V Role in Windows Server 2016 will support Nested Hyper-V instances.

Woot woot, sounds of rejoice are echoing through the virtualized data center!

One of the very few drawbacks of Microsoft Hyper-V was that you could not run a Hyper-V host as a Guest on a physical Hyper-V host. This is known as nested virtualization, and is a “feature” that VMware has been able to do since 2008. For many of us, myself included, nested provides a fantastic way to scale a small home lab much further for educational purposes. Nested has a use case in Enterprise environments too…take a checkpoint of my host, apply the latest security patches or host configuration change to see if anything breaks before rolling into production. If the change breaks, simply roll the host back to checkpoint and you’re up and running.

Earlier on Monday (10/12/2015) Microsoft released Windows Insider Build of Windows 10 (10565) that includes a very early preview of Nested Hyper-V within this specific Windows 10 build. The Virtualization Blog includes the exact steps and caveats to configuring this preview.

Image courtesy of: Nested Virtualization in Windows 10 Build 10565 – Ben Armstrong – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

Nested Hyper-V really excites me, the possibilities are limitless when you start thinking out of the box just a bit. Imagine a Virtualized Data Center running in Azure, nested. Why? Because it’s awesome and I can 🙂 This will all become a reality soon enough!

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