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Nested virtualization on Azure : a step-by-step guide

alibekjakupov's avatar
alibekjakupov
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jan 19, 2025

This article serves as a practical guide for developers and engineers to enable and configure nested virtualization on Azure. Nested virtualization allows running Hyper-V inside a virtual machine, providing enhanced flexibility and scalability for various development and data science applications. The guide walks through selecting the right Azure VM, setting up the environment, and installing Docker Desktop for efficient container management. It also addresses common troubleshooting tips to ensure a smooth setup. Whether you're working with complex machine learning models or developing applications, this guide will help you maximize the potential of nested virtualization on Azure.

For many developers, working on a virtual machine (VM) offers several benefits. It allows them to select the configuration that best meets their requirements without investing significantly in physic...
Updated Jan 19, 2025
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Weishan Yang's avatar
Weishan Yang
Copper Contributor
Jun 23, 2025

This document is very helpful. One question though, is there a list of VMs supporting nested virtualization/hyper-v for ARM64 architecture? 

alibekjakupov's avatar
alibekjakupov
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jun 23, 2025

Hi Weishan Yang​, thank you for your kind feedback. At the moment, no VMs using ARM CPUs support nested virtualization. This detail is available on each VM’s series information page.

Below are links to the currently available VMs that run on ARM-based processors (thanks deherman-MSFT for the reference):

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/dplsv5-dpldsv5-series
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/dpsv5-dpdsv5-series
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/epsv5-epdsv5-series

  • Weishan Yang's avatar
    Weishan Yang
    Copper Contributor
    Jun 23, 2025

    Thank you for the timely response, alibekjakupov​. I did deploy the arm64 vm of Windows 11 on Standard D2ps v5 successfully. However, the issue is with the nested Hyper-V not support there, and therefore I cannot enable Hyper-V on the vm which result docker not able to run on that vm. So, to run docker on arm64 Windows is what we're looking for. But looks like there's no easy answer on Azure at this moment yet.