"Nested virtualization involves running a hypervisor inside another hypervisor. It is not an entirely bonkers idea because it offers the chance to create a test or simulation environment for the collection of linked VMs that makes up many enterprise IT setups. The technique can also be useful in production for containerised workloads, which often see tools like Kubernetes and Docker run in a VM, and every container running in its own VM."
"Nitro is invisible to users. "To support nested virtualization, the Nitro System passes the processor extensions, such as Intel VT-x, to instances to facilitate running nested virtual machines," states a user guide to the new offering. "The nested virtualization architecture consists of three layers: the physical AWS infrastructure and Nitro hypervisor (L0), your EC2 instance running a hypervisor (L1), and one or more virtual machines created within that instance (L2).""
"Amazon suggests its new feature might come in handy "running emulators for mobile applications, simulating in-vehicle hardware for automobiles, and running Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows workstations.""
AWS has enabled nested virtualization on select EC2 instances (C8i, M8i, R8i) that use Intel Xeon 6 processors with updated Trust Domain Extensions. Nested virtualization permits running a hypervisor inside an EC2 instance to create L2 virtual machines for testing, simulation, and some production containerised workloads. The Nitro System passes processor extensions such as Intel VT-x to instances to support nested VMs, creating an L0 (AWS/Nitro), L1 (EC2 instance hypervisor), and L2 (guest VMs) architecture. AWS currently supports Hyper-V and KVM as L1 hypervisors, leaving potential support for other hypervisors open.
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