Hyper-V! What is the point or the advantage behind using this?

Hi

I was watching one of Kari's videos to do with Audit Mode the other day and wondered why he uses Hyper-V?

They say there is no such thing as a dumb question, right?

What is the benefit to installing the Hyper-V interface in Windows 10 22H2 please?

All I can enable on my machine are the Hyper-V Management Tools and the Hyper-V Services?

Perhaps the Hyper-V Hypervisor is greyed out because I do not have virtualisation enable in my BIOS? Or at least I think it isn't?

Thanks in advance

Bree said:

For me the benefit is being able to run half a dozen completely different PCs at the same time on the one machine. I have some that are Insider builds (to see what's coming next), other that are older versions of Windows, and a Linux mint VM too. These I use for testing networking interoperability and answering questions about networking with mixed OS's.

That's bonkers. Absolutely brilliant illustration of how it can be used. Cannot begin to imagine the complex issues you might have to deal with regarding interoperability!!!

Bree said:

For Home that's all you can enable anyway, but your profile says you have Pro. Yes, to use Hyper-V to run virtual machines you need virtualization enabled.

Yes. I am on 22H2 Pro.

I think Kari has or does use it for creating custom iso builds which is what generated my question.

So I am wondering if I can create an iso, store it on a virtual drive until required or to be modified, then drop it into a partition as a recovery image so it resides on the same drive or even another drive for fast recovery if ever needed, you know with all the drivers and programmes I use.

Kari talks somewhere of being about to get back up and running from disaster status within 10-20 minutes from memory which would be amazing.

- - - Updated - - -

Actually. I've just had a thought.

Is it possible with Hyper-V to launch my old hard drive with its separate OS installed and which is currently plugged into my PC as a virtual machine?

Would I be able to transfer files from the old hard drive to the new one in that way? That would be super useful if I am able to network the drives together and somehow drag and drop in File Explorer?

cereberus said:

You can network between Host device and HyperV vms in same way as you would between two pcs on LAN.

That's useful to know. Thanks.

Bree said:

For me the benefit is being able to run half a dozen completely different PCs at the same time on the one machine. I have some that are Insider builds (to see what's coming next), other that are older versions of Windows, and a Linux mint VM too. These I use for testing networking interoperability and answering questions about networking with mixed OS's.






For Home that's all you can enable anyway, but your profile says you have Pro. Yes, to use Hyper-V to run virtual machines you need virtualization enabled.

[I]I think this may the answer to all my dreams.

I finally got two of the old Windows 7 hard drives up and running. It's been an absolute nightmare.

Not I think it would be a good idea to partition a 1Tb drive into say 4 VM's so that I can run each drive with its own operating system.

In your setup above, do you only have small partitions like less than 10Gb per partition? I can see the word "Assigned me"? Perhaps it's not the partition size. They seem small.

I could run anything on my desktop which I could eject ( like an 8-track ) and install into something like a Legion or
GDP and still run the same operating system with the same parameters more or less. Eliminating the need for another
machine, device, or anything at all. All I need is a sim-card modem to get on my 4G connection and I am good to go
with just about any need. Maybe a portable display as well.

Game Boy/Gear + Phone + Radio + typewriter + program tool = all in one package. No BS, No $#@#$ having three machines,
or three towers. Just one SSD I could pop into any machine. Only thing better is if it could shoot lasers out of it, or had an
edge that of a Klingon Bat'Leth. It would be like the keyboard setup from "Digital Devil" or even "Shadow run"

In fact just to make it cross platform. Imagine if I had a Leopard OS install on a SSD. That I could pop into any PPC or Intel device.
Now imagine if leopard could run on Arm as well. Then within that I am also running Virtual machines with save-states.

One OS, Many VM, One machine to rule them all, Now imagine if this thing could lift me across the river or bay like Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, and then I could spot Mary Popping showing some leg in those clouds ahead.

That is why you want to have Virtual Machines. However yes Hyper-V might not work well with others and cause a blue-screen,
but you need to balance everything.

Rhothgar said:

Hi

why he uses Hyper-V?

Perhaps the Hyper-V Hypervisor is greyed out because I do not have virtualisation enable in my BIOS? Or at least I think it isn't?

Thanks in advance

Hyper-V ( side channel mitigation ) is a feature used for years. Basically pass through the processing power directly to the
guest ( server / container ) being run. You have servers of peoples operating systems being used online as dummy/decoy locations. All having their own assigned IP address. For all intentions we could run systems from one location and claim it
to be another while all systems are from one location and one machine via an operation/outing of sorts.

You go into the BIOS and browse and you should see one to two settings. The second setting is optional, but the first must
be functioning. Sometimes you could bypass this entirely by just setting _______________ and this way you will have use of
anything that requires Hyper-V to run.

For me I am able to use later Memu rather then Earlier Memu ( an android emulator with GPU and controller assigning features ),
I am able to use viboot ( which in turn is really Hyper-V ) to checkout if my backup is working. I am able to use WSL 1 or 2
and thus able to load Waydroid via a gnome ( wayland ) container and run android. I am able to use Android Subsystem.

Windows "Hyper-V" ( the actual functioning program ) literally is a "free" solution for you to have many operating systems
running. IDK but I assume if I could run 21H1 in my 1904 then I could point to a folder containing my "Starfield" game and
run it from there on. But whoops!!! Hyper-V does not support DirectX12.

Vmware and Vbox are different. They use alternative means to accomplish this. Thus turning off Side-channel-mitigations is
preferred. Again does not support DirectX12.

So think about it. With Hyper-V I have so far

Ability to run Linux with GPU support and the ability to run Android via containers
Ability to run Android with GPU and controller pinning.
Ability to run Android that works in the background and "looks" no different then my windows app. Imagine if I have synchronizing two applications.
I don't know(IDK) about Apple OSX but I assume it is possible to run it with qemu or another, especially since it has intel support,
and synchronize via other apple products over your account. However without Hyper-V I am able to do with Vmware or Vbox.
Then of course is DOSbox

Just yesterday I reading about

gcc
g++
nano
cmake


Think about it. I tried to compile a simple "hello world" program.

In Powershell/Command-line it made an a.exe

but

in WSL Ubuntu it made a.out

Of course I was following instructions. Now my goal is to code via the Command-line/Powershell I want that a.exe to function
properly if I run it. I follow the instructions to run "a"

a.exe gives me an program fail error

a.out give me the "hello world"

with the "./" why is one working and the other is not working?

.................................................................................................... ......................

Right in front of me a free compiler I could use to make any kind of program I want to make for DOS, Windows, Linux, or
whatever.

Then there goes "Python" which gave us "Mugen". Why not?

.................................................................................................... .......................

Bree said:

You see my VM named 'W10 Home - Office 2003'?

That started life as an IDE drive, the only working part left from an old XP laptop that had died. It had a licensed copy of Office 2003 that I wanted to rescue. I put the drive in an external usb enclosure, made a system image of it with Macrium Reflect, then restored that image to a .vhdx virtual drive for Hyper-V to use in a VM. I then proceeded to upgrade the VM from XP to Vista, Vista to Win7, then Win7 to Win10, keeping all installed apps through each upgrade.

That's 'Assigned memory', the amount of the host machine's RAM each VM is currently allocated for its exclusive use. Hyper-V can dynamically assign RAM, so if a VM needs more RAM (and the host has enough free RAM) the VM will be given more.

Generally I give each of my VM's a 128GB virtual drive. I use a dynamically expanding .vhdx for the virtual drive, so it only occupies enough space on the host machine's drive to hold the used data in the virtual drive.

Thank you!

I've managed to revive the old drives on the original machine but now I've plugged them into my new machine some don't appear as readable. I think tomorrow I will plug each one in one by one and do a repair so that each one boots on the new system or is there a quicker way that you would know of?

I've been watching Kari's video on Hyper-V but cannot see how I can make an existing physical drive into a virtual drive without wiping it?

I now have a 1Tb drive which I have formatted to NTFS and was wondering if there is a way to clone those old drives into virtual hard disks on the 1Tb drive?

Looks like I just have to do what you did - image it and then restore it to a vhdx drive?

One issue I have is as I upsized in hard drive size I used the previous license every time on the new drive with a clean install so I have a valid Win 7 licence and a valid Win 10 licence but I have a couple of each OS type of drive which I want to save. I can foresee licensing issues maybe.