Nesting Hyper-V in PVE

[imrazor]

I've been using Proxmox as a virtual lab to study Windows Server installation and configuration. One feature I'd like to learn and use is Hyper-V. Hyper-V does not support some features that I want, so I'm not looking to install it long term. However, unless I can figure out how to nest it in Proxmox it looks like I'll have to install Windows Server 2012 R2 to bare metal to study Hyper-V. I'd much rather nest it in Proxmox, then throw the VM away once I've learned it.

However, when I try to install Hyper-V in 2012 R2 running as a guest in Proxmox, it tells me that there is a hypervisor runnning and will not let me install the Hyper-V role. Is there any way around this?

An old posting on this forum suggested that AMD CPUs and "recent" Intel CPUs support nesting. The post was from 2011, however. I have two systems available to experiment with. One is a whitebox system based on an Asus P8Z77-V LK motherboard and an Intel i5-3570K. The other is a Dell workstation with a Xeon E5620. Would either of these CPUs support the necessary features to get a nested hypervisor running? What configuration changes would I need to make to the host and/or guest?

 

[dcsapak]

hi, AFAIK nested hyper-v in kvm does not work sadly.

 

[LnxBil]

I also tried and failed. 2012R2 detects also the emulated hardware (name qemu is in there) and then does not allow hyper-v.

 

[e100]

I've run a windows VM inside Proxmox that was nested inside Proxmox but that was like 4 or 5 years ago with, I think, Proxmox 1.x

My Google fu says that only windows 2016 can run a vm inside of nested hyper-v and it looks like that only works when nested in hyper-v and maybe vmware too.

 

[LnxBil]

If I remember correctly, 2008R2 could be tricked to start the hyper-v role, but that definitely changed for 2012. I also experimented with nested VMware, but it was not very stable - if it booted at all. I stopped to try after roughly a week of work and we bought used 1 HE DH360 machines for at most 500 euro per machine, installed the OS native and we never looked back. I'd suggest to do something similar.