Seems that nested virtualization is becoming popular on public cloud: first with Ravello, this year also on Azure, and now Google Compute Engine supports nested virtualization in beta.

This feature allows you to run one or more virtual machines inside a Compute Engine Linux virtual machine by leveraging Intel VT-x, processor virtualization instructions, to deliver better performance than what’s possible with alternative technologies like emulation.

Nested architecture is like others:

Usually nested virtualization it’s useful for lab. But with reasonable performance makes also possible for enterprise users to move their on-premises, virtualized workloads to the cloud without having to import and convert VM images.

Dev/test and CI/CD workloads that need to validate software in multiple environments are a good match for nested virtualization. Nested virtualization also enables more cost-effective, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions and is ideal for technical training and certification courses where students need identical environments to practice the exercises.

A number of partners participated in our nested virtualization alpha, including Scale Computing and appOrbit.

For more information see this blog post or check the Compute Engine nested virtualization documentation..