Virtualization allows us to run different operating systems more securely and efficiently on different hardware configurations. These advantages have made it a very desirable and very popular solution especially in the professional sector, but thanks to this technology it is also possible to do very curious things, as shown by e.g. Winception, which was tagged NTDEVchannel that showed how Windows 7 works in Windows 8 and virtualized Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11 at the same time.

We could define it as a “nested virtualization”, and the truth is that it is an excellent example of what virtualization has advanced and what possibilities it offers. The platform used was VMWare Workstation because, according to the author of the video, it was the only one that really offered him everything he needed. For example, with Hyper-V I had problems with freezing after applying three layers of virtualization, and with VirtualBox I could only get two layers.

The result achieved by NTDEV is quite good, especially considering that his team uses the APU Ryzen 7 5800HS and 16 GB of RAM, this means that it is not a high-end laptop, but a model that right now It is considered medium. If I remember correctly, all Ryzens support nested virtualization, so hardware did not play a limiting role in this case.

Overall, it’s clear that having a Winception of this caliber with so many layered virtualized operating systems means that ultimately resource consumption is high and performance is negatively affected. However, the fluency of each operating system depends on its position in the resource chain, and in this case Windows 7 is the one with the worst response because it was the last in this virtualization chain.

In the attached video, you can perfectly see this reduction in smoothness that occurs when opening different emulation layers of Windows 7, and the video itself explains why this happens. It’s basically because of what I explained to you because the first layer of virtualization they have more resources at their disposal than the lower tiers.

A very curious project that could be even more interesting if these virtualization layers were extended to even lower levels older operating systemssuch as Windows 95. Hopefully they will dare to try it in the future and most likely Windows 11 will again be the basis for starting that nested virtualization.