64-bit VirtualBox inside a VM

[TBone_1985]

I need to setup a Windows 8.1 64-bit VM on my VMWare environment.  Inside it I need to run a 64-bit VM with VirtualBox.  I've installed Windows on the VM and installed VirtualBox, however, I can't get it to show 64-bit....Only 32-bit.  I've added vhv.enable = "TRUE" to the VMX file (saw that somewhere) and ensured Hyper-V was not installed on the Windows 8.1 machine.  Any other suggestions as to what I'm missing?

ESXi 6.0.0, 3620759

[vHaridas · Accepted solution]

have you tried to select checkbox for "Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest OS" under VM CPU settings?

You can see this option using web client or new embedded host client.

Thanks,

Haridas

Virtual Admin

[TBone_1985]

Thanks Haridas!  I never think to check the web client.

[Ray_handels]

Hello TBone,

We are trying to achieve the same setup, running Virtuabox for browser testing in a VDI environment.

What are your experiences with it? I though that VMWare does not support this but I'm not 100% sure if this is indeed the case.

Have you ever had any blue screens or stuff like that happening after enabling this?

[AnsHelm]

Wow I didn´t know that it is possible virtualization inside a virtual machine. Thank you, so useful

[Ray_handels]

I received an answer from VMware support about this. Yes, it is possible, no it is not supported (at least about a year ago) so I would not suggest using this in a production environment.

[sjesse]

If you where to do this, I'd setup a seperate enviornment for desktops just for this purpose, it works but you run into a lot of problems that you don't with it off, its why its not supported. You can run into wierd contention issues among other things, and will see reduced performance in the nested hypervisor.