Run PCF Dev on Windows 10

I am exploring Cloud Foundry platform and I discovered Pivotal Cloud Foundry Dev edition is available for download and install on Windows 10.

However, as I was going through the instructions I noticed that  PCF Dev requires Virtual Box to run. That poses the problem as Virtual Box can't run side-by-side with Hyper-V. As I am heavy user of Hyper-V and run many different VMs at the time, dropping Hyper-V and using Virtual Box is not an option for me.

Fortunately there is away to run Virtual Box inside a Windows 10 VM hosted on Hyper-V. Basically you create new Windows 10 Hyper-V VM and install Virtual Box in it. When you start Virtual Box and try to create a new VM you will likely get error complaining about lack of VT-X.

To solve this problem you need to enable Nested Virtualization with in your Windows 10 host.

Run following PowerShell script with elevated privileges.

Set-VMProcessor -VMName <VirtualBox VMName> -ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $true

After that you should be all set to install PCF Dev on your Windows 10 hosted in Hyper-V.

Here you can find complete instructions on installing PCF Dev on Windows.

This works on Windows 10 Anniversary edition or later.

Hope this will save you some time!