Learn how to – Enable Nested Virtualization on Xen | XCP-ng Virtual Machine

Learn how to – Enable Nested Virtualization on Xen | XCP-ng Virtual Machine.

Nested virtualization is a feature that’s useful in some scenarios such as debugging hypervisors in a constrained environment and testing larger virtual deployments on a limited amount of physical resources. Nested virtualization is not recommended in production user environments, it is primarily intended for development and testing purposes. For Nested virtualization to work your XenServer/XCP-ng hosts needs to have virtualization extensions enabled.

$ cat /sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities
xen-3.0-x86_64 xen-3.0-x86_32p hvm-3.0-x86_32 hvm-3.0-x86_32p hvm-3.0-x86_64

In this guide we’ll show you how to enable nested virtualization on a Virtual Machine running in XenServer / XCP-ng Infrastructure. Follow these steps to enable, configure, and start using nested virtualization in Xen virtualization environment.

Enable Nested Virtualization using Xen Orchestra

Xen Orchestra is a user friendly administration tool for Xen Servers. It is designed to ease the administration time for your infrastructure. We can easily turn on Nested Virtualization for a Virtual Machine on Xen | XCP-ng Virtual Machine from Xen Orchestra console.

Login to Xen Orchestra Web interface.

If you don’t have Xen Orchestra check out our installation guide:

• Deploy Xen Orchestra Appliance on Xen/XCP-ng from CLI

Select the Virtual Machine to enable Nested Virtualization from “Home” > “VMs” > “VM Name” and Stop the instance.

Then go to Advanced tab of the Virtual Machine.

Enable nested virtualization by toggling the switch to on.

Once done boot the VM machine.

Login to the instance and confirm whether nested virtualization is available on your host system.

$ cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nested
Y

If this command returns Y or 1, the feature is enabled.

More guides on XenServer | XCP-ng:

• How To Create Internal Network in Xen | XCP-ng
• Deploy Xen Orchestra Appliance on Xen/XCP-ng from CLI
• Add and Use ISO Library Storage Repository in Xen XCP-ng