Unfortunately, you will not be able to use Hyper-V in a virtual machine.

Hyper-V requires hardware assist from the CPU (such as VT), but VMware uses the same functionality to run 64-bit guests, and only one piece of virtualization software is able to use it at a time.

...roll-on to Mar, 2010....

Well, that was then - but what about now?

You can run ESX 4 under Fusion 3. I'm on new MBP which is running Windows 2008 R2 64-bit guest. One would assume (always a dangerous thing to do) that a new Intel-based MBP would have Intel-VT enabled in the BIOs. However, W2K8 R2 still complains when you try to enable the HyperV role...

I guess the error message can only mean two things. 1. Intel-VT IS not enabled on a MBP (which seems unlikely). 2. You need a special backdoor entry in the .VMX file (as you do in ESX) to make this work...

Time to googlewack and experiment.

I would normally have not interest in this. But Intel-VT and AMD-V are mandatory for HyperV (unlike ESX!) and the only machine I have that would support that atttribute is the MBP...

Regards

Mike Laverick

RTFM Education

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk

Author of the SRM Book:http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/2010/03/22/new-administrating-vmware-site-recovery-manager-4-0/

Free PDF or at-cost Hard Copy

No change.  Current VMware products do not virtualize AMD-V or VT-x.

Mike_Laverick wrote:

If Fusion 3 doesn't expose the Intel-VT attribute - how does it make 64-bit guest work on Intel for Fusion?

Fusion 3 uses VT-x for running 64-bit guests.  It just doesn't virtualize VT-x for the guest to use.  Typically, the guest doesn't need VT-x.  Aside from other hypervisors, no guest OS would have any use for VT-x.  Running nested hypervisors is not very practical for performance reasons, so there isn't a tremendous motivation to virtualize the hardware-assisted virtualization features of the CPU.

I notice your saying Intel-VT-x. Not noticed that -x before, what's that meant to represent...? Is the sub-edition of Intel-VT-x?

Intel VT covers VT-x for the x86 architecture and VT-i for Itanium.

Just trying understand what attribute HyperV is looking for, and why/what Fusion presents...

Hyper-V is looking for bit 5 of CPUID[1].ecx to be set, indicating support for the VMX instructions.  Since Fusion does not support these instructions in a guest, we report bit 5 of CPUID[1].ecx to be clear.  All of the VMX instructions trap to the hypervisor when executed in a guest, so Fusion would have to emulate the effects of these instructions.  That code has not been written yet.

To the best of my knowledge, the only hypervisor that virtualizes the hardware-assisted virtualization features of the CPU is kvm.  Also, as far as I know, they have only done so for AMD-V to date; they have not virtualized VT-x yet.

Mike_Laverick wrote:

What I'm not getting is this - if Fusion can run ESX4, why can't it run Hyper-V. I ass-um-ed that a virtual ESX & Hyper-V would want to see the same attributes?

ESX does not require hardware-assisted virtualization to run 32-bit guests.  It has the option of running 32-bit guests with binary translation.  Hyper-V does not include binary translation technology (although Microsoft's other hypervisors, VPC 2007 and Windows Virtual PC, do.)

However, if you were to try to run a 64-bit nested guest under virtual ESX, you would encounter the same issue:  ESX would complain that it cannot run a 64-bit guest without VT-x.