Nested Virtualization – Oracle VM Server

Recently, we are working on Oracle virtualization (Oracle VM Server – Xen) solution on our lab and we have plan to deploy the solution on our Oracle (Sun) servers in production environment.

At first step, we need to test the solution on our test servers and we don’t have enough resources to add additional servers to our farm just for the test.

So we have to create some our server as virtual machines and test Oracle VM Server’s features such as DRS, DPM, Live Migration, Repository Migration and others.

You know, you can deploy any hypervisor on your ESXi server by adding some parameters in the machine configuration file (VMX) but what is same solution for Oracle VM Server?

Does it support nested virtualization?

Oracle VM Server supports nested virtualization but I couldn’t find any solution on Oracle documentation center!

But as you may know, Oracle uses Xen in its product as hypervisor, so I found my answer on this page:

Nested Virtualization in Xen

We should add some parameters to VM configuration file:

hap=1
nestedhvm=1

There is some conditions:

  • Xen 4.4 or later
  • Intel CPU with EPT support

You should read the wiki page for more information.