Running a vm inside a vm

Question

I have a cloud VM from a commercial cloud VM company. This host VM is windows server 2008. I have installed vmware player on this host and I want to run an ubuntu vm in it. VMWare player shows an error when I try to run ubuntu - "VMWare player and hyper-v are not compatible. Remove the Hyper-V role from the system before running VMWare player."

Failed solutions:

1 - Remove hyper-v from control panel -> remove windows features. Hyper-V was not even present here.

2 - Remove hyper-v by using powershell. It says success, but my problem was not fixed.

How do I fix this problem ?

Answer 1

You can't. Hyper-V is running on the computer that hosts your VM.

If you're using Azure, then it looks like some classes of instances support nested virtualization. You may have to use Hyper-V instead of VMware.

Answer 2

Update to Windows Server 2016 or Windows 10 with at least Anniversary Update (v1607), here it is possible to run nested VMs with Hyper-V.

Nested virtualization is a feature that allows you to run Hyper-V inside of a Hyper-V virtual machine. In other words, with nested virtualization, a Hyper-V host itself can be virtualized. Some use cases for nested virtualization would be to run a Hyper-V Container in a virtualized container host, set-up a Hyper-V lab in a virtualized environment, or to test multi-machine scenarios without the need for individual hardware.

But the nesting only works with Hyper-V. So you can't run VMware inside a Hyper-V VM.

Virtualization applications other than Hyper-V are not supported in Hyper-V virtual machines, and are likely to fail. This includes any software that requires hardware virtualization extensions.