AWS expands EC2 with support for nested virtualization

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expanding EC2 capabilities by supporting nested virtualization on select instance types. These are the C8i, M8i, and R8i instances. They enable organizations to run virtual machines within a virtual machine.

According to The Register, this technology is particularly relevant for scenarios in which entire IT environments need to be simulated or tested. In such cases, the environment often consists of multiple interdependent virtual systems. Nested virtualization can also play a role in modern container platforms, for example when orchestration and management layers need to remain separate from the underlying workloads.

AWS notes that the functionality can be used for software emulation, automotive simulations, and development environments that run Linux on Windows, among other applications. Until now, nested virtualization within AWS has been limited in practice to bare-metal instances, where customers have direct access to the physical hardware. With the new support, this limitation has been partially removed.

The new capabilities are linked to the use of Intel Xeon 6 processors. This generation includes improvements in hardware isolation that better separate virtual environments. Like other EC2 instances, these variants run on AWS Nitro, which handles the abstraction and allocation of hardware resources.

Architecture with multiple virtualization layers

For nested virtualization, Nitro passes certain…