Dmitri on Virtualization

Why would you ever wants to install Virtual Server inside a VM? R&D or Demo Lab. My use case is building a portable lab for testdriving System Center Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2 on laptop with WinXP.  Ideally, I would have a single fully functional VM with all VMM components, that manages the Virtual Server on the host laptop. But VMM agent doesn’t install on XP.  So I attempted to install Virtual Server on the Virtual Server VM running Win2k3.

Is it possible? Short answer is NO.  Virtua Server intalls on VM no problem, but fails to start: “Virtual Server encountered an unexpected error, 0×00000003.”. Let’s have some fun and install Virtual Server on VMWare! What now? Pretty much the same, only the error message is obscure: “Virtual Server encountered an unexpected error, 0×00000003.” No luck

Is this NO final? Never say never. People thought it wasn’t possible to install EsX inside a VM until VMWare Workstation 6.0. But someone knowledgeble shared with me that it was all possible well before, with secret tricks well kept in VMWare. There might be a trick kept in Microsoft. Or you might know, then please leave a comment!