Stupid Computer Tricks | What happens if you install a Virtual Machine inside a Virtual Machine?

June 3, 2007

Anyone familiar with virtualization technologies has wondered about it. There’s XEN, Qemu, VMWare, VirtualPC and VirtualServer, to name a few — but what happens when you run one inside the other? A Virtual Machine inside a Virtual Machine!

I have Vista Business installed in a VMware virtual machine. Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 is the host OS — I decided to try to install VMware Server inside the Vista virtual machine… Well, the results aren’t exactly exciting.

VMware’s error message:

Clearly, VMware in VMware isn’t going to work (at least not with a Windows guest). So, I’ll try a different approach. How about Slackware 11 under VMware, and then Damn Small Linux under QEMU within Slackware? This should be a treat… Or just unbearably slow.

Eureka! It works! It’s alive! And it’s almost usable. The only real problem is the mouse sensitivity — it’s very blocky and hard to control, but everything is there. Check out some screenshots of this machine within a machine within a machine!

Posted in blog entries