Virtual machines within virtual machines

Question

Is there a way to start VirtualBox or Hyper-V within Azure virtual machine? It worked once on specific VM size then which VM size is it?

Answer 1

Hi,

The feature you are looking for is Nested Virtualization. You can check if the Virtual Machine series (several of them do) supports it by looking at the details page for each. For example, below is screenshot from Dv3/Dsv3 series:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/dv3-dsv3-series

Below is article from back when Azure introduced Nested Virtualization:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/nested-virtualization-in-azure/

Please Accept Answer if the above was helpful.

Thanks.

-TP

Answer 2

Hi @Nick B ,

Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A platform. Happy to answer your question.

I believe you can use Nested Virtualization approach on azure VM using the Dv3 and Ev3 VM sizes. Nested virtualization is a feature that allows you to run Hyper-V inside of a Hyper-V virtual machine (In your case it will be an azure VM). Here is the detailed blog post on this feature support announcement made by Azure Product Management https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/nested-virtualization-in-azure/

Other References: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/user-guide/nested-virtualization I used this approach to debug issues with faulty VMs as mentioned here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/troubleshoot-vm-by-use-nested-virtualization

Please "Accept as Answer" and Upvote if the answer provided is useful, so that you can help others in the community looking for remediation for similar issues.

Answer 3

Thank you so much everyone. I could not find the detailed information showing that about virtual machine so I was wondering why some time ago one of virtual machine series worked with virtualization. It is really important to me for virtualization in VM to work, but at same time it had stopped working on the same VM size for some reason.