Run VM Technology Inside Another VM with Hyper-V

Run VM Technology Inside Another VM with Hyper-V

If you are like me, you want to run proof-of-concepts inside a VM. Well this sounds easy enough, but if you dig deep it is pretty challenging to accomplish, when you are testing a VM technology like localstack. The main reason is the VM doesn't have direct access to the processor. Luckily Microsoft has a one line solution to the problem. Just run the following from the host for the VM you want to expose virtualization on.

Set-VMProcessor -VMName "VM Name in Hyper-V" -ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $true

If you are running KVM, it's possible to do this, but with a bit of extra work. See article by Fedora.

If you are using VirtualBox, don't waste your time as it won't work. It's really too bad that it isn't supported as of yet.

Just to note, I haven't gone over enabling virtualization in the bios. You might get an error related that and it should be easy enough to resolve with a web search.