Does Google Cloud services support nested virtual machines?

Question

I'm trying to configure an application to run on Google Cloud. I was able to start a VM running Windows 2008 Server (64bit) and install VMWare Player inside it. Then I tried to install and boot a second VM within VMWare Player, and Windows crashed.

So, my question is, does Google Cloud support "nesting" VMs in this fashion?

In case it matters, the "inner" VM's operating system was Linux (also 64-bit).

Answer 1

You cannot run Virtual Machine inside the GCE VM, as Virtualization is not enabled in any of the machines which are created under GCE. Currently Google doesn't have this functionality in its VMs.

Even if you tried to enable the Hyper-V in the Windows Sever GCE instance it will not allow you to do this because the processor should support the version of hardware assisted Virtualization.

I would suggest to create another Linux VM on Google Cloud Services, if you still need another machine.

Answer 2

Nested support in GCE is now in Beta (as of September 2017):

Documentation: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/enable-nested-virtualization-vm-instances

Blog posting: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/09/introducing-nested-virtualization-for.html

Disclosure: I work at Google on GCE.