Q. Can I install more than one Hyper-V host on a physical server?

A. This question confused me initially. When asked if you can install multiple Hyper-V host instances on a single physical computer, my initial response was no. The hypervisor uses the Ring -1 interrupt level, so no other hypervisor could run on the same physical piece of hardware.

This initial response, however, is both right and wrong. While it is accurate to say that you can only run one hypervisor on a physical server, you can actually run multiple instances of Hyper-V on a single server. Additional instances of Hyper-V would run as guests. The hypervisor of the guest Hyper-V instances wouldn't be able to start, so you couldn't run any virtual machines (VMs), but you could have multiple Hyper-V management instances. This configuration could be useful for testing VM creation and management, but you can't use these additional instances to run VMs.

Related Reading:

Check out hundreds more useful Q&As like this in John Savill's FAQ for Windows. Also, watch instructional videos made by John at ITTV.net.