I have a custom hypervisor configured based on CentOS/KVM, but there are times (especially for testing purposes) when I'd like to be able to install my hypervisor OS as a virtual machine. The intent of the hypervisor of course is to create and manage VMs. So creating the hypervisor itself as a VM causes problems. When I run virt-install under this environment, I get the error

ERROR Host does not support any virtualization options

This is not entirely unexpected. The question though is there a way that I could get virt-install to work from within a VM?

You can install the virt-manager inside a VM then connect to the KVM servers:

CLI:
# virsh --connect qemu:///remoteserver1.mydomain.com

GUI:
# virt-manager --connect=remoteserver1.mydomain.com

Or more simple yet. You can run virt-manager then add a connection to the remote KVM server.

Let me know if this helps.

That's not quite what I was asking. I want to treat my VM as a hypervisor and be able to run commands such as

virt-install --connect qemu:///system ...

directly on the VM. I don't want to connect to an external hypervisor.

You can run a VM GUEST inside a VM HOST, but you "cannot" run a VM HOST inside a VM GUEST. It would be like toasting the toaster with two slices of bread.

Yeah, I was hoping there was a way to cheat...

Oh well...