Running Virtual Box VM inside VMWare VM (Windows Server 2008)

I am trying to run Virtual Box VM inside VMWare VM (Windows Server 2008 64 bit)

I am getting below error on booting virtual box vm.

Stderr: VBoxManage.exe: error: VT-x is not available (VERR_VMX_NO_VMX) VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code E_FAIL (0x80004005), component ConsoleWrap, interface IConsole

I have enabled VT-X virtualization setting on the VMWare VM. and Hyper-V is not installed on VMWare VM (Windows Server 2008).

Also on the Virtual Box - i could see options for installing only 32 bit guests (Even though Windows Server 2008 is 64 bit)

I am not sure what else i could be missing?

1 Answer

At 2018, VirtualBox does not support nested virtualization. There is a feature request for a while, but it is not implemented nowadays.

According to different reports, nested virtualization are supported to run in other systems. For instance:

• HyperV on HyperV
• HyperV on VMware Workstation or ESXI
• HyperV on Azure VMs
• QEMU/KVM on HyperV. QEMU 2.12 has experimental support for Windows Hypervisor Platform Extensions
• KVM on hypervisors compatible with Intel VMX.
• KVM on Google Cloud VMs
• VMware on VMWare Workstation or ESXI
• Xen on XEN, KVM, VmWare or HyperV

William Lam has a blog page with several articles on nested virtualization.