Last July, Microsoft announced Windows 365 Cloud PC, a virtualized cloud operating system offering. The service went live over the next month and, in fact, was so popular that Microsoft had to temporarily suspend the free trial to balance the load on its cloud infrastructure.
For those of you who don’t know, Windows 365 allows businesses to download from Windows systems hosted on Microsoft’s cloud. It’s a complete Windows experience that provides each employee with personalized settings, applications and data. You don’t need any special hardware to run it, just choose from multiple pricing tiers from $20 all the way up to $162 — which gets you a cloud with up to 8 vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage computer.
Now, Microsoft has revealed that it is bringing support for nested virtualization to Windows 365 Cloud PCs. At launch, this will support Linux and Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) in preview. Basically, this means that businesses can run Hyper-V inside a Hyper-V Windows 365 virtual machine, and run Linux and WSA directly within it.
This capability is bound to benefit developers using Windows 365 cloud PCs and wishing to virtualize another OS for testing and/or cross-platform development. However, it will only be enabled for “certain license types”, which may be the more expensive Windows 365 Enterprise, but it’s unclear.