Microsoft announced nested virtualization support with the Dv3 and Ev3 series of Azure VMs. Wow! So, what does this mean and what are some use cases? Well, think about moving workloads to Azure from your on premise data center. You may have a Hyper-V host with an environment all ready to go. We want to test it out and see what it would look like to move it to Azure for testing purposes. Now we can “lift and shift” that on-premise Hyper-V host to Azure. Ultimately we would want to move those VM-vms (like how I did that?) to their own environment.
So, what other workloads could we use nested virtualization for? Remember VDI and RDS? Is this a first step to bring back true VDI in Azure? Not sure because of the partnership with Citrix and the deprecation of Azure RDS but who knows? What about running multiple mobile emulators on a VM? That would definitely help developers organize their environments.
Brent Stineman commented on the nested virtualization blog and brought up another great case around Windows Containers. Nested VMs are needed to run with hyper-v isolation and also provides a more encapsulated environment to test out code from unknown sources.
All in all, I think this is going to open up a whole new look at virtualization in Azure and would love to see some more use cases as they develop.
