Enabling hypervisor applications brings Windows 11 VM to a grinding halt

[clivew61]

I'm running a Windows 11 22H2 VM on a late 2015 27" iMac with a 4 GHz i7 processor and 32 GB RAM. I've allocated 2 processor cores and 8 GB RAM to the VM. I wanted to install the Android Subsystem and run the Amazon App Store, just to see if it would work. In order to do this, I believe I have to enable hypervisor applications in the Settings menu, but when I do, the VM grinds to a halt and is completely unusable. What am I doing wrong? and is there any way I can add the Android Subsystem to my VM?

[ColoradoMarmot]

Expected unfortunately.  Hypervisor support has major performance issues as a limitation of the underlying apple frameworks.

[clivew61]

Oh well, I'll give that a miss then. Thanks for confirming the issue.

[Technogeezer]

My bet is that the Intel chip in that Mac does not support VMCS shadowing. If the hardware doesn’t support it, Fusion drops into a software implementation if you are enabling nested virtualization. VMware states this software implementation does have performance impacts. 

You should also see if you have side channel mitigations enabled for the VM. Enabling them when nested virtualization is active is a known performance hit. 

[Mikero]

I was looking into this recently on physical hardware actually.

Can I ask about your use case for the Amazon App store? 
What are you looking to run from there?

In my experience, apps from there have been almost unusably slow on my recent-gen Dell, and that's not even running 'nested', that's just on the hardware.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Thanks - should have added those nuances rather than a drive by post 🙂

[SvenGus]

Anyway, not only for Docker, WSL2 and WSA, but also more in general, the current lack of nested virtualisation on Mx Macs (and it’s still not really known if due only to the incomplete Apple frameworks’ or to the processors’ limitations: it looks like nobody knows anything definitive about this…? M1 no and M2 yes? both potentially OK? how is the situation?) is a big no-go, especially for OS enthusiasts and for teaching purposes (everything ideally should be replicable as on a real PC, in a VM): now, some sources apparently say that the M2 supports NV - but will Apple ever add support to it, in its frameworks…? Who knows…