virtual unreality

[loudog]

has anyone loaded a virtual machine inside a virtual machine, inside a virtual machine, inside....... well you understand the question by now i think.

[Rudge]

It shouldn't be hard to try out but my guess is that you will run out of resources very fast.  

[jaydot]

back in the days of cp/m, i was able to load wordstar within wordstar up to seven times before running out of ram, which was a massive 64k <-- nota bene 'k'.  pointless, but interesting.

[Phil]

I recall O-P saying he tried it. From memory the Russian Doll idea does not work, no virtual machine inside a vrtual machine.

[kjpetrie]

It probably depends on the software, but it doesn't work with VBox because its guest and host drivers are not compatible with each other

[fraxinus]

I tried once to do this in VMWare and it was not a happy experience. I cannot now remember why (and yes, there WAS a reason!). I think that you can do it in principle but that system resources will run out very rapidly. kjpetrie reminds us that it may be a complete non-starter in VirtualBox - I never tried it there.

[sling-shot]

May be the drivers installed by virtualisation software need access to real hardware?

[loudog]

so it appears that if the software does work with virtual drivers then its a matter of resource limitations. hmmm. i think ill fire up one of my other machines and have a look see. i think linux inside linux would be the best senario to try first because of the stability of the os unless there is info to the contrary. 

[T6]

i remember someone making that, linux loading virtualbox with xp, in xp they loaded windows virtual pc and in there loaded windows 3.11

perhaps you could put 98se instead of 3.11 and the load a old virtual pc and then load 3.11

that would mean 4 levels of inception 

of course the limitation is how much resources virtual box can give to the first machine working as a container for the rest, if i remember correctly is 2 cores and 4 gbs of ram?

[llewellyn]

Just to say how delighted I am to find I am not the only one who remembers CPM. I still have disks and must try get them copied onto modern media then i can run some of the old programs on a virtual CPM just for fun.