As most of virtualization technologies like VMware, Hyper-V, KVM and others, OpenShift Virtualization requires hardware virtualization, which usually means that you need to use bare-metal servers for your OCP cluster. By default, OpenShift Virtualization uses the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), which is a full-virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware. KVM uses the virtualization extensions Intel VT or AMD-V to enable device emulation. Of course, in a lab environment isn’t always possible to have physical servers available for this kind of tests, so we usually leverage nested virtualization, like when we want to run a virtual ESXi host on top of a physical ESXi host.
In this post I’ll explain how to enable Software Emulation in OpenShift Virtualization, to be able to run VMs when the default Hardware Virtualization isn’t available.