Purely Hypothetical Situation...

J

John Howard

Hunter
Is it possible to install and run a VM within a VM?

By that I mean - if I wanted to, could I install Parallels workstation within a WinXP VM then install and run a "guest-of-a-guest" OS (such as Linux) inside the "guest" WinXP VM?

Not that there would be any good reason to do this (or would there be?). I am just curious whether it would work...
 
It wouldn't work because both VMs would be attempting to coopted certain chip instructions. You could however run an emulator inside a VM, assuming the emulator is purely software based.
 
You can run a Solaris zones within a Solaris VM. Zones are virtual machines but don't use hardware virtualization or emulation of any kind - they run native on the same processor(s) as the host. It is one of the most efficient VM methodologies I've ever used - 30 or 40 VM's on a single host are not only possible, they don't even drag down the system. Each zone is a fully isolated, independant system.
 
I think you could probably do the same thing with jailed bsd's. Might be worth doing, if you had different people accessing different machine configurations on the same VM.

OTOH, you can just create more VMs. Think that's when you start getting into enterprise level servers.

rickb
 
Running hardware virtualization within hardware virtualization is not a good idea primarily for the performance reasons - the guest virtual machine :) will run terribly slow.

On the other hand, other types of virtual machines (SWsoft Virtuozzo/OpenVZ, Solaris Containers etc) should run fine.

Best regards,
Tim
 
John Howard said:
Is it possible to install and run a VM within a VM?

By that I mean - if I wanted to, could I install Parallels workstation within a WinXP VM then install and run a "guest-of-a-guest" OS (such as Linux) inside the "guest" WinXP VM?

Not that there would be any good reason to do this (or would there be?). I am just curious whether it would work...
Click to expand...

:)
If the only thing you want to know is if it is possible, then the simple answer is Yes. We even take advantages of this kind of software layering here internally. But for now i personally can't imagine how could our customers take advantages of this rechnology even if they got one delivered...
 
I remember this happening once by some college students... They took an XBox, hacked it, made it run Linux, which ran a hacked OS X virtualized...
 
Eru Ithildur said:
I remember this happening once by some college students... They took an XBox, hacked it, made it run Linux, which ran a hacked OS X virtualized...
Click to expand...


That is not this. Linux was the native OS on the XBox in this case, OSX was the sole virtualized OS - it was not a VM within a VM (or else you explained it wrong)
 
There was someone who ran something like Virtual PC on a Mac, then run a classic mac emulator within that, then ran an apple // emulator within that....
What people do when they have time to kill (can you tell I have some time to kill ;) )?
 
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