In this post, I’ll show you how to enable nested virtualization on Windows Server or Windows 11. Nested virtualization allows you to run a Hyper-V host inside a virtual machine. There are a few steps required to set this up, and we’ll walk through them together.

Step 1

Store your physical Hyper-V host name in a variable.

$VMHost = 'Hyper-V-Host'

Step 2

Enable the Virtualization Extensions.

Set-VMProcessor -VMName $VMHost -ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $true

Step 3

Enable MAC Address Spoofing on the Hyper-V Host.

Get-VMNetworkAdapter $VMHost | Set-VMNetworkAdapter -MacAddressSpoofing On

Step 4 (recommended)

Disable Dynamic Memory.

Get-VM -VMName $VMHost | Set-VMMemory -DynamicMemoryEnabled $false

Step 5 (recommended)

Remove all existing snapshots.

Get-VM -VMName $VMHost | Get-VMSnapshot | Remove-VMSnapshot

Step 6 (recommended)

Turn off the snapshot feature.

Get-VM -VMName $VMHost | Set-VM -CheckpointType Disabled -AutomaticStartAction Nothing -AutomaticStopAction
ShutDown

Mission accomplished. Now you are ready to set up a hyper-host in a vm.