Answer
:
Nested Virtualization allows you to run a Hypervisor within a
VM. There are still some limitations of nested virtualization,
like:
- Checkpoints cannot be applied to a running VM.
- Live migration fails for the VM.
- Runtime memory resize does not function.
These limitations can lead for a need of another level of nested
virtualization.
There are many use cases for nested virtualization. Some of them
are:
- A beefy workstation with 32 GB of RAM running VMware
Workstation allows us to run three ESXi hosts, each with 8 GB of
RAM. Three ESXi hosts are the bare minimum for running a vSphere
lab.
- A growing use case for more critical workloads involves the
public cloud. Oracle Ravello, for example, has long provided the
capability to run nested virtual machines in both Google Cloud and
Amazon Web Services (AWS). Google direct support is a validation of
the need to run unmodified workloads directly on the cloud.
- An alternative to VMware Cloud on AWS is to run ESXi directly
on Google Compute Engine. While not supported by VMware, the
solution provides a hack for getting test and dev workloads on
elastic compute resources.