Enabling hardware acceleration on a VM inside a VM

Question

If I enable Hardware Acceleration in a VMware virtual machine that has another virtual machine (but without hardware acceleration enabled) as a host, will it have any effect?

Solution

To the best of my knowledge, the VMWare virtual CPU (the CPU that the guest sees) doesn't include hardware virtualization support. (Certainly it doesn't on our VMWare cluster.)

This means that enabling or disabling hardware acceleration for a second-level guest shouldn't make any difference, just as it would make no difference for a guest on a physical machine that didn't support hardware virtualization.

Comments

[Zac B]

So your setup is: Physical server -> VM (no HA) -> VM (HA) ?

[Bogdacutu]

Yep, that's right.

[alpha]

Why does Inception come to mind?