Install MS Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V on VMware Workstation v12

Hyper-V

  

Hyper-V is a Windows Server role that lets you create a virtualized server computing environment where you can create and manage virtual machines. You can run multiple operating systems on one physical computer and isolate the operating systems from each other.

Sometimes we need to build test or proof of concept environments and we don’t have required hardware resources and to take over this obstacle we can build multiple Hyper-V 2012 R2 servers using VMware workstation v.12 or in other words we can build nested virtualized environment by installing Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V on VMware Workstation v.12.

By default VMware Workstation v.12 does not allow installing Hyper-V Role on a virtual machine running Windows Server 2012 R2 and when you try to install Hyper-V Role you will receive the following error message as shown in the following image:

To resolve this issue shutdown the Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machine we need to follow the next two steps.

Step 1:

          Make sure that the “Intel VT-x and AMD-V” Virtualization engine for the virtual processors of the virtual machine of Windows Server 2012 R2 is enabled.

          From Virtual Machine settings, click on Processors, under Virtualization engine, check on Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI checkbox as shown in the following image and click OK.

Step 2:

          From the folder of the Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machine open the file with ".vmx" extension using a text editor (i.e Notepad) and add the following line at end of the ".vmx" and save the file.

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"

 Start your Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machine again and try to install the Hyper-V Role. The following video is a full demo for installing MS Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V on VMware Workstation v12https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T4VkBjMPGU