Practical use of Nested virtualization

Question

Hey I've just started using GCP and recently I've come across nested virtualization in GCP. If you can help me with some examples where nested virtualization is necessary to implement in a VM.

Answer 1

Nested virtualization allows two things:

• Run VMs inside VMs: This is useful if you want run a VM and you are already on a VM(google compute engine)
• Run multiple VMs on the same machine: This is useful to reduce costs, or share identical environment between VMs with minimal effort.

Google itself gives these example use cases:

Nested virtualization makes it easier for enterprise users to move their on-premises, virtualized workloads to the cloud without having to import and convert VM images. Dev/test and CI/CD workloads that need to validate software in multiple environments are a good match for nested virtualization. Nested virtualization also enables more cost-effective, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions and is ideal for technical training and certification courses where students need identical environments to practice the exercises.

And a real life customer case, where they are concurrently testing an app on multiple virtual android environments on the same compute engine instance.

This is a huge win for QA and development teams who need native mobile systems, such as Android, for testing/validating mobile apps. Using Google’s new hardware-accelerated nested virtualization, Functionize now enables QA teams to dramatically reduce costs, time-to-test, and the pain of maintaining a complex device inventory. — Tamas Cser, Founder and CEO, Functionize