Hyper-V role inside Hyper-V virtual machine

Few times until now colleagues asked me it is possible to install Hyper-V role inside Hyper-V virtual machine! Yes, it’s possible, but (always that BUT) you can’t run virtual machine on virtualized Hyper-V host. You can install Hyper-V role inside Hyper-V virtual machine through PowerShell or Virtual Machine Manager. Of course, this is workaround and isn’t supported!

In this blog post I’ll describe how to do that through PowerShell.

Very often I use that scenario in my presentations/demos, for example… demo for Hyper-V Replica, demo for Hyper-V Cluster, etc..
On laptop I have Windows 8 with Hyper-V role installed and couple of virtual machines.

In this case I’ll install Hyper-V role on the VM called GuiToCore. As you can see in the picture, Hyper-V role isn’t installed.

Logon into virtual machine and open PowerShell as Administrator and type:

dism /online /enable-feature /FeatureName:Microsoft-Hyper-V

After few minutes role is installed and you must restart virtual machine

When you logon again into virtual machine you need to install Hyper-V Management Tools. You can do that through PowerShell or via GUI.

As you can see in the picture below we have Hyper-V role on the Hyper-V virtual machine installed.
 

Now, I will install one virtual machine into virtualized Hyper-V host ;)

As I mention at the beginning, when try to start VM you will be get error. This scenario is very useful only for the demo purposes.

Enjoy in your virtual virtualized environment! :)

Cheers!