Developer Conference 2015

Nested Virtualization is an interesting feature to allow guest hypervisors to run their own guests utilizing hardware provided virtualization extensions. Much of the work for Intel processors is based on the Turtles research project at IBM.

This talk is intended as an introduction to the feature and how it works in its current form. We will briefly discuss various performance improving features that have been introduced such as nested EPT, Shadow VMCS and APIC Virtualization for Intel Processors. We will also discuss some work-in-progress features that could enhance functionality and improve performance.

This discussion is expected to help users gain a better understanding of the topic so as to ease troubleshooting, experiment with new and interesting use-cases and get a better understanding of currently available processor features to make Nested Virtualization better.