Inception - is the concept possible?

[Preacher]

Basing this on that much overrated film with the dream within a dream scenario..

I want to use hyper v on my windows 8 machine to have a safe environment where i can try new program's and what not.

I'm going to install windows 7 as a virtual machine but I also want to play some windows 98 era games. Could I use VMware on the windows 7 VM to install windows 98?

So I would have my win 8 PC with a VM of win 7 which has a VM of win98.

Is this possible?

I know I could just setup another VM, one for win 7 and one for 98 but this appeals more to my inner geek

[Splash]

Depends on the hypervisor used, but as you say it would be pretty pointless. With VMWare Workstation you can nest VMs - my lab runs Win8, VMWare Workstation on there with nested ESXi nodes which host virtual machines themselves.

[Moby-Dick]

I dont think you can nest hypervisors with Hyper-V sadly - I have a similar setup to splash for some of my lab setup.

[Rob_B]

I apologise.....however it seems someone had already thought of it...

[TeePee]

He's still dreaming!

[Preacher]

Quickly googling hyper visors!

Im being dumb, that's xzibit isn't it?

[scaryjim]

Just for fun, I'm trying to install Haiku in a VM under VirtualBox, inside a Win 8 instance running inside VirtualBox. It appears to be working, but it's pretty slow, presumably because the nested VM can't utilise hardware virtualisation. The outer VMs CPU usage is being caned at 100% constantly. And Haiku is a very lightweight OS - my actual Haiku VM runs very quickly with only 256MB system RAM, single CPU core with constrained 40% utilisation and 8MB VRAM. It's a nice idea, but I think you'd need some special jiggery-pokery to make it functional.

[stilkun]

Lol I did something similar few months ago as I was curious how a VM with a VM would run. What I had a VMware workstation 8 with xenserver hypervisor to create a VM on xenserver and it was running slow however this may be because I did not have VMware tools installed on the xenserver and if I attempt to install Citrix VM tools on VM on the hypervisor which eventually caused it to crash. Oh and Citrix Xenserver was not support on VMware workstation 8.

What Windows 98 games you are trying to play? Is it a dos based game, I suggest using DosBOX which will emulate dos enviroment

[ty2010]

For your nested vm something less directly dependent on hardware support would work better, I had luck running ms virtual pc.