How To Setup A VM On A Cloud PC

What’s up, everyone!

I sometimes get the question if it’s possible to run a virtual machine on a Cloud PC. And the answer is; yes, absolutely! This could be extremely handy if you are a developer for instance. But there are some things to take into consideration. Let’s take a look!

Prerequisites

You need the have the following prerequisites;

Windows 365 Enterprise
8vCPU/32GB (downsizing will disable nested virtualization)
Make sure to check the supported regions here.
Make sure to reprovision your Cloud PC if it’s provisioned before April ’22.

You can use the following virtualized workloads;

Disk space The prerequisites do not say anything about the size of your disk. You can run out of disk space pretty quick if you're using a 128GB disk. My advice would be to plan accordingly and use a larger disk.

How to setup Hyper-V on a Cloud PC

Let’s take a look at the steps to enable nested virtualization using Hyper-V. Just go to the Add/Remove Windows Components and check the box for the Hyper-V role. Once installed, you’ll need to reboot the Cloud PC.

Demo on a Dutch Cloud PC The Cloud PC I'm using for this demo is using the Dutch language. I'll translate if necessary but I think most of the screenshots will make sense anyway.

You can create the VM’s the same way as you would on a physical machine. There’s really no difference here.

Follow the wizard and configure are you like. You should end up with something like this;

For this demo I used a Windows 10 Enterprise (English) operating system. Just right-click the VM and start the VM.

This is already looking pretty good! Follow the instructions and wait until the installation process completes. I didn’t notice any delays while installing Windows 10. The performance was pretty much on par if you would compare it to a more recent physical device that uses an SSD.