Nested virtualization: VMware Workstation inside Hyper-V

Question

Is it possible to use VMware Workstation in Windows 10 Pro or Windows Server 2016 guest inside Hyper-V? I've heard of Windows Hypervisor platform and Hyper-V integration. But does it apply to Hyper-V guests or only to the Hyper-V host?

Answer 1

It is not recommended to do this in a Production environment, but with the newest versions of Hyper-V and VMware, you can do this.

VMware Workstation V16.1 released 11/20/2020.

With prior versions of these apps it was not possible, so this is a bit of a work in progress.

https://www.veeam.com/blog/nested-vitualization-hyperv.html

From time to time, we need to test something in our infrastructure. Production is not good idea for this, so we build a test environment. Sometimes, such tests may require changes in the hypervisor, which we want to avoid in the production. In such cases, we can work on dedicated test hardware or we can virtualize. Virtualization nesting can be helpful for development, getting familiar with new technologies, new product versions or learning purposes where we can easily simulate our production environment. Recently, Microsoft released Windows Server 2016 with a lot of cool stuff around virtualization like Nano Server, Storage Spaces Direct, Shielded VMs and many, many more. If you want to test these new features, you can virtualize it.