Nested Virtualization of Windows Hyper-V on XCP-ng
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@olivierlambert I think this issue is the single biggest problem with XCP-ng (Xen). 2nd is just general windows guest support.
While I have installed older Windows on XCP/Xen, the whole lack of Hyper-V support is an important issue because it's becoming a requirement and it works on other hypervisors. I know newer versions of Xen do a better job without guest tools installed, but they are still important.
This is a major blocker for customers moving from VMware to XCP-ng/Xen. They just can't do it because Hyper-V fails and easy/good guest tools are also a problem.
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Thanks for your feedback. We'd love to have better support for that, but those 2 problems are hard. This require a lot of work to debug and understand what's wrong.
We are still a small company despite growing fast, so we do our best with what we have.
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@clockware you can convert your machine from bios booting to uefi booting. Simple by converting MBR to GPT but you will need a win 10 iso
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@AlexanderK VMWare setup had UEFI BIOS, when I'm portable on my laptop I use Hyper-V built into Win10Pro, it also uses UEFI / Gen2, in XCP-ng I tried both BIOS and UEFI settings. BIOS doesn't boot, checked just for the record. UEFI booting works, but UEFI+Nested-V doesn't (causes Win10 to troubleshoot itself). So it doesn't seem like partition recognition problem, it feels like Windows + Virtual Hardware to me (but may be UEFI image also matters, in my experience in different envs yes it might).
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@clockware ok i misunderstood...
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Is there any updates on nested virtualization and hyper-v?
I've tried to run docker on windows 10 vm and didn't succeed on this.
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Sadly, there's not a lot of market traction for it. Obviously, contributions are very welcome, otherwise, it won't make progress by itself (not until we continue to grow enough to tackle more stuff in our backlog at once. Note: we almost made +30% in headcount just in 2022, so it's moving fast, but still plenty to do and we can't do everything!)
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@olivierlambert thank you for your comment.
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I am finding myself in this really unfortunate situation. We want to use Microsoft Connected Cache which requires Hyper-V. Microsoft Connected Cache is a way to cache inTune installation packages to reduce internet usage.
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Is there any news about Nested Hyper-V support?
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I'm not aware about any progress on that direction. It's more like an upstream Xen Project question by the way, you might ask on the Xen Project Matrix community: https://xenproject.org/help/matrix/
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@olivierlambert Okay. Thank you.
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@olivierlambert thanks. I asked. No estimate.
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Though a little old this is the only thread that seems applicable to my needs right now... Do we have any ideas on when this might become available in Xen?
I have a client that needs to use part of Hyper-V for an application they are using. Are there any workarounds? I see Proxmox seems to support this, but I haven't tested.
Thanks!
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There was a talk in Xen Summit about what needs to be done to complete Nested Virtualization support, but I don't know if anyone in the Xen Project followed-up.
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@stormi Bummer... Because I really could use the ability to run Hyper-V in a Windows Server VM... It's needed for a certain application that a client of mine uses.
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@FTSSupport I'd first consider talking to the client and/or the clients vendor that is requiring this. Nested virtualization, even on setups that work, is NEVER recommended for something that requires good up time and reliability, so it might be best to avoid this.
I have had issues with nested virt in ProxMox as well, admittedly less than in XCP-ng, but it's still not good enough on either that I'd use it consistently.
Is there a reason the application needs Hyper-V? The reason I ask is, I've had something similar due to a vendor who required ESXi for their VMs. Turns out there was no good reason for that and we ended up having to spend a ton of money for no real benefit. Has created more headaches down the road too w/ lack of central backups, etc... and massive wasted resources (time, money, all of the above). The vendor has since said they'll help us move to XCP-ng, but it's a big process and there was no reason for ESXi in the first place.
So maybe, just maybe, there's a chance the vendor/application developer can be convinced otherwise? One of the points of virtualization is keeping options open.
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@planedrop Just to keep things cohesive in these threads, I'm linking my response https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/81103
But yeah I may take your advice and call the vendor.
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i was searching for nested virtualization on windows vm because i wanted to install docker desktop and nested virtualization should have been enabled
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@AlexanderK Right, which in some ways in similar in what I'm needing, because there are applications that need Hyper-V.
