Installing VirtualBox inside a virtual machine?
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Anyone have you tried running the virtual box inside a virtual machine?
I found this forum saying it's not supported : https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=31408
but some people here said they tried running another virtualbox on a virtual machine.
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20589 -
What you are looking for here is called nesting and is generally a very bad idea for production usage, especially with VirtualBox as that is a type 2 so you will have an OS on a hypervisor on an OS on a hypervisor, so double nested! So if nesting is bad, double nesting is double bad and type 2 is bad on its own. So lots of bad.
Nesting support is 100% about the host hypervisor and has nothing to do with VirtualBox, so you are looking in the wrong place for support. The question is "does your base hypervisor support nesting", VirtualBox has no way to know that it is or isn't nesting and has no ability to support or not support it.
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It will serve as lab-testing.
@scottalanmiller Thanks for the reply.
I found these:
Running Nested VMs= https://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8970
Support for running ESXi/ESX as a nested virtualization solution (2009916) = https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2009916 -
VMware ESXi definitely supports nesting, so that should end up working.
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@scottalanmiller said in Installing VirtualBox inside a virtual machine?:
VMware ESXi definitely supports nesting, so that should end up working.
But how useful would something like this actually be?
I'm just trying to understand the use case where this makes sense for learning.
Wouldn't a desktop with VirtualBox be "better"?
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@DustinB3403 said in Installing VirtualBox inside a virtual machine?:
@scottalanmiller said in Installing VirtualBox inside a virtual machine?:
VMware ESXi definitely supports nesting, so that should end up working.
But how useful would something like this actually be?
I'm just trying to understand the use case where this makes sense for learning.
Wouldn't a desktop with VirtualBox be "better"?
Depends on what is being learned.
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Oh, a spin-off thread. Missed that.
Like I said, Hyper-V can do nested (or V-in-V) virtualization. Even when running on a desktop machine like Windows 8 / 10.
Just did that myself because we had to extract something from a vagrant file. Can also be good for evaluating other (type 1) hypervisors like running Xen on top of Hyper-V.
It's good in some cases but never ever think about production usage (yet).
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@thwr said in Installing VirtualBox inside a virtual machine?:
Oh, a spin-off thread. Missed that.
Like I said, Hyper-V can do nested (or V-in-V) virtualization. Even when running on a desktop machine like Windows 8 / 10.
Just did that myself because we had to extract something from a vagrant file. Can also be good for evaluating other (type 1) hypervisors like running Xen on top of Hyper-V.
It's good in some cases but never ever think about production usage (yet).
That's because it is bare metal and never actually runs ON Windows 10, Windows 10 always runs on it. -
Hello everyone, thank for answering my question.
I escalated to my manager and he advised the End User . -
@scottalanmiller said in Installing VirtualBox inside a virtual machine?:
@thwr said in Installing VirtualBox inside a virtual machine?:
Oh, a spin-off thread. Missed that.
Like I said, Hyper-V can do nested (or V-in-V) virtualization. Even when running on a desktop machine like Windows 8 / 10.
Just did that myself because we had to extract something from a vagrant file. Can also be good for evaluating other (type 1) hypervisors like running Xen on top of Hyper-V.
It's good in some cases but never ever think about production usage (yet).
That's because it is bare metal and never actually runs ON Windows 10, Windows 10 always runs on it.You are right, I tend to forget that at times
