DaDesktop Nested Virtualisation Compatibility

Nested virtualisation can be a bit of a struggle to get humming at the best of times. Below we’ve set out which virtualisation tools work a treat, or at least get the job done, depending on the environment within DaDesktop.

Give us a shout if you have any queries. Some tools aren’t available on every OS, for instance Virt Manager.

You can find more info on using Virt Manager to spin up multiple sandboxed servers and/or desktops.
 

		Intel CPU		AMD CPU
		KVM	LXC	KVM	LXC
Virt-Manager	Windows	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
	Linux	√	√	√	√
VirtualBox	Windows	√	N/A	X⑃	N/A
	Linux	√	√⑁⑂	X⑃	√⑁⑂
VMware Workstation	Windows	√⑀	N/A	√	N/A
	Linux	√⑀	X	√	X

 

Test environment:

Intel CPU Model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3 @ 2.40GHz

AMD CPU Model: AMD EPYC 7502P 32-Core Processor

Window: Windows 10

Linux: Ubuntu 20.04

Virtualbox: 6.1.18

VMware Workstation: 16 Pro, v16.1.1

Comments:

⑀: Intel VT-X & AMD virtualisation acceleration in the guest isn’t supported. You must untick the "Virtualise Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI" checkbox in hardware-processors

⑁: The version of VirtualBox on the guest must match the version of VirtualBox DKMS on the host

⑂: Running VirtualBox in LXC doesn’t play nicely with KVM VMs, so you’ll need to stop all KVM instances on the host

⑃: Got a soft lockup systemd-udevd error – things went slow and got stuck