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Hyper-V within a guest VM running on AHV

  • 23 June 2023
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MWStu
Userlevel 1
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Hi

We have a cluster running on AHV and have recently found that its not possible to host guest VMs running Hyper-V within them, as a layer 2 hypervisor.

The scenario is we have a few Windows 2016 VMs running on ESXi at the moment and each VM has the Hyper-V role installed in Windows 2016, providing containers for Docker.

We want to move the VMs to our Nutanix cluster but running Hyper-V within a VM is not a supported type of nested virtualisation.

Support say there are only 2 types of nested virtualisation supported:  Credential Guard and WSL2.

Docker is able to use WSL2 for containers as an alternative to Hyper-V but our problem is we need to stick to Windows because our apps are coded for Windows and our Dev team are not keen on re-writing everything!

I’m looking for an unofficial workaround, is there a way to force AHV to allow in-guest layer 2 hypervisors to run?   Its possible on ESXi, it feels like there should be an option in the host’s BIOS to enable compatibility.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

 

Kind regards

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Best answer by sl.farhanparkar 25 June 2023, 21:22

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sl.farhanparkar
Userlevel 3
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Hi,

As official support its not supported out of the use case of Credential Guard and WSL2, 

but I was able to run Hyper-v inside Windows 2022 on Nutanix AHV using hardware virtualization enabled for lab scenarios. You can give try but there will be no official support and use it your own risk.

You can run until you are able to refactor or redesign the applications. 

To test it use Move to migrate VM, once migrated to AHV, shut down the VM, use cli to enable hardware virtualization and power on to test the hyper-v / docker function.

acli vm.update <VM_name> hardware_virtualization=true

the command is supported on AOS 6.5.1 or later along with AHV 20220304.242 or later

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