Nested virtualization?

[Corefile]

Has anybody tried this on the M4 Mini with success? E.g. have you managed to run WSL2 successfully in ARM Windows, or run a Linux VM in Sequoia while emulating Sequoia in the Linux VM?

 

[startergo]

You can use the nested virtualization in Fusion:

How to run Nested Virtualization on a Mac - GraspingTech

Nested virtualization lets you run a virtual machine inside a virtual machine, and though it may sound silly, it’s very useful for testing apps. This guide

graspingtech.com

And UTM with apple hypervisor:

• (macOS 15) Nested virtualization for Linux Linux VMs using Apple Virtualization backend on macOS 15 and M3 or newer will now have nested virtualization enabled by default.

Enable Nested Virtualization on Mac OS 15 · Issue #6700 · utmapp/UTM

Continuation of #3405 Mac's Hypervizor.Framework supports nested virtualization starting with Mac OS 15.0 (Sequoia), if the host CPU is M3 or later. We need this to be also supported in UTM, so tha...

github.com

Or through the apple virtual framework:

isNestedVirtualizationEnabled | Apple Developer Documentation

A Boolean value that indicates whether nested virtualization is in an enabled state.

developer.apple.com

 

[alawisahel]

Hi all,


I recently got a MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro chip, and I’m trying to explore nested virtualization — basically, I want to run a VM that itself can run more VMs (for example, to test ESXi and nested guests inside it).


From my research so far, it seems like UTM is the only option that currently supports nested virtualization on Apple Silicon — specifically using the Apple Virtualization Framework (AVF) instead of QEMU.


I’d love to know:

Is UTM really the only app that exposes that feature?

🤔 Are there any other hypervisors (Parallels, VMware Fusion, VirtualBuddy, etc.) that support this on M4 or plan to?

Why I'm asking:

I'm trying to boot ESXi-Arm Fling ISO (which is a bare metal type 1 hypervisor) inside a VM and run guest VMs from there — but UTM, even with the proper config, freezes while booting the ISO (it stalls right after loading modules).


The same ISO works fine in VMware Fusion, but Fusion doesn’t support nested virtualization on Apple Silicon yet.


So I’m kind of stuck — UTM supports the feature I need but won’t boot the OS I want, and VMware/Parallels don’t support nested yet.


Any advice, tips, or confirmed working setups would be really appreciated! 🙏