Installing Hyper-V under VMWare 8 and 9
How to nest a type1 VM (Hardware based assisted virtualization) inside a type2 VM (Software based assisted virtualization)?. When we try to install a Windows Server 2008 R2 or a Windows Server 2012 VM, and select the Hyper-V Rol, or even try to install Hyper-V Server 2012 on a VMWare VM, the system will tell us that is not possible because the processor is not compatible with virtualization or that we need to enable it on the BIOS.
In fact, if we try to do it with a VM inside Hyper-V, it will tell us that is not possible because the environment is already being executed inside a VM. In other words, VM nesting is not supported.
This is the situation that we´re facing. Besides, drilling, i´ve found a new feature inside VMWare Workstation 8 and 9, that allows us to Virtualize the CPU Virtualization Technology.
I´ll be explaining how to take advantadge of this feature in order to get the environment running in the next lines.
So let´s begin explaining what do we need this for… Well really, i don´t know you guys, but i´m not willing to spend lots of money on new hardware in order to test out the new technologies that come out, and so on to continue my learning path at home or at work, and even less, dedicate a whole server to install hyper-v and test it out. So what we´ll do, will allow us to build our own lab.
· First of all, we need to have a machine capable of CPU Virtualization via hardware, and a good amount of RAM memory (i recommend at least 8GB) ;)
· Install VMware 8 o 9 on our machine.
· Create a VM with the custom option
· Select the hardware compatibility on VMware 8 or 9 if you have that versión.
·Select the option «I will install the operating System Later».
·Select the Guest Operating System, in this case we´ll select Microsoft Windows and the «Windows Server 2008 R2 x64» versión.
·Assign the CPU and RAM configuration as we like.
·Before finishing the wizard, click on «Customize Hardware», to add another Network Card, because of the requirements of Hyper-V (also is a good choice if we want to do NIC Teaming), and select the checkbox that states «Virtualize Intel-VT…» on the Processors tab.
·Finish the wizard and before starting the new VM, we´ll edit the VM config file (.vmx,file located on the folder where the VM is stored) with the notepad, and add the following line at the end of the file:
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = «FALSE»
·Once it´s done, proceed to start up the VM and install our Windows 2008 R2 X64 (or whatever) and add the de Hyper-V role following the wizard…
Hope it helps someone :)
