I already wrote a blog post about some of the new features which are coming with the next version of Hyper-V. This week was the Microsoft Build Conference where Microsoft was talking a lot about new stuff for developers and the future of Windows, Azure, Office and so on. Now today I found a very interesting email in my inbox from Ronald Beekelaar (Microsoft MVP for Hyper-V) and he had the chance to visit a session at Build Conference where Taylor Brown and Mathew John were talking about Windows Containers: What, Why and How. In this session there was a quick side note, that Windows Server vNext Hyper-V will support nested Virtualization.
Until today a Hyper-V server could only run Virtual Machines when he was running on physical hardware. This was no problem in production, but when you wanted to do some demos or training you needed a lot of hardware to show what is possible with Hyper-V. Now with nested Virtualization you can run Hyper-V inside a virtual machine and build for example a demo and lab environment on your notebook, creating Hyper-V Clusters and so on.
As for some of you this might be not a big deal, this is a huge deal for everyone who did demos or training on Hyper-V.
You can watch the session here on Microsoft Channel9.
Tags: Build, Build 2015, Build Conference, Demos, Hyper-V Server 2016, Microsoft, Nested, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Containers, Windows Server, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V, Windows Server Hyper-V Last modified: May 1, 2015
I’ve been running Hyper-V in VMware already for ages!?!? Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.
Of course I knew that :) But running VMware to run Hyper-V virtually kind of sucks in customer demos and presentations :)
Love this.. finally we will be able to demo Hyper-V clusters in a virtual lab
Thomas, when did they talk about nested Hyper-V? It looks like on about 39-40 mins of video. They talks about VMware, KVM, Zen, but I don’t hear something about nested Hyper-V particularly. But probably my English doesn’t allow me to hear it clearly :)
Well, Taylor confirms these news. Thomas, thanks.
Excellent News. Currently im using VMWare to do my hyperV testing.
Hi,
Thanks for sharing. This is great news. Can’t wait to try it in my lab.
Do you know if it is supported in tech preview 2?
I don’t think so
Great ! I’ve been using the (excellent btw) VMware Workstation so far for this. In a Lab setting (VDI for example) you need this, because with nested virtualization and tons of RAM you can set up entire infrastructures on a single workstation. Since there are no users logging in and doing stuff, CPU gonna be allright. It kinda annoyed me that I had to use VMware to do this when there was Hyper-V available in Windows replacing the horrible virtual-pc. VMware workstation is allright tough, but using the integrated OS solution would be nicer.
Wondering will Hyper-V vNext be available in Windows 10?
It is already in the latest Insider Build for Windows 10
I’m waiting for hot add/remove CPU & MEM support for Windows 2016. Any info on that? Then we could run nested Hyper-V under ESXi and provision by demand :)
Hot add and Remove will be supported in WS2016 :)
Cool. I can’t wait to deploy nested WS2016 hypervisors running on ESXi with option to dynamically change resources on the fly.
Will this allow for nested Virtualization of other hypervisors? For example KVM, which is needed if for example you have a GNS3 server running in Hyper-V and you want to simulate Cisco NX-OS.