Virtual Machine Win 10 w Hyper-V Qs

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#205105 30-Oct-2016 07:14

Hi finally about to have a desktop - the last time I had one was a decade ago, and I think I used Windows Virtual Machine or something. It had a lot of limitations, IIRC poor graphics being one of them.

I have been reading and it seems the WVM is now called Hyper-V is that right? From what I read I can't seem to find many limitations of this Virtual Machine. Are there any obvious limitations? GPU? Smooth keyboard and mouse, sound etc?

Yes I have a valid key to install win 10, how does Microsoft keep the details of the VM if I needed to reinstall the VM because I stuffed it up?

I don't know if you will laugh at me but I don't like clutter of my registry and temp files everywhere and I like to test software like photo editing, video editing, to games to antivirus etc. Is this the VM to do it on?

Wow quite messy post hope you can read my Qs, I will bold them. THanks

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#1660786 30-Oct-2016 09:10

joker97: I have been reading and it seems the WVM is now called Hyper-V is that right? From what I read I can't seem to find many limitations of this Virtual Machine. Are there any obvious limitations? GPU? Smooth keyboard and mouse, sound etc?

Correct. GPU is somewhat limited.

Best performance and responsiveness with the vm file on a different drive but it will work happily on the same drive for the most part.

My personal opinion is hyper-v* makes virtualization look bad. There is a reason VMware is the market leader. Some limitations may be similar but the experience is so much better. VMware player is free, VMware workstation is well worth an evaluation. /sidetrack

*Hyper-v bare metal is a better experience but that's not an option on the desktop.

I'd say go for it and learn from experience.

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#1660787 30-Oct-2016 09:15

joker97: I don't know if you will laugh at me but I don't like clutter of my registry and temp files everywhere and I like to test software like photo editing, video editing, to games to antivirus etc. Is this the VM to do it on?

Definitely not laughing here. It is an excellent reason to use virtual machines.

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#1660793 30-Oct-2016 09:52

Licensing. It looks like Windows 10 Retail cannot legally do what you want. I could be wrong, but its critical if there are activation issues. Maybe call Microsoft after installation and see if they will activate.

Does 10 have an unlicensed mode like win7 running for 30 days before activation? That was never ideal because no windows update, but it was useful for 3rd party software evaluation.

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#1660795 30-Oct-2016 09:58

Few things, be aware that you need Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise/Education to enable Hyper-V, it's not supported on Home.

The performance is fine, no different in my experience to VMWare Workstation. Obvious limitations that apply to either is that it's a _virtual_ machine, not a direct passthrough of the host hardware, so the VM doesn't see your whizbang GPU, it see's the VMWare or Hyper-V virtual graphics card. There are some circumstances where you can pass through physical hardware GPU's for increased performance, but AFAIK that technology is not present in any of the desktop virtualization offerings (More for servers running VDI).

So the TL;DR of that is you almost certainly won't be able to play games (at least modern ones) in a Hyper-V guest.

With regards to the Win 10 key, It's a bit ambiguous in your post if you have one key and plan to use it for host and guest. If you want to run Win 10 as a guest on Win 10, you will need two separate Windows 10 licenses, one for the physical machine, one for the virtual.

Hope that helps.

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#1660822 30-Oct-2016 11:20

Dual booting windows 10 with another copy of windows 10 seems like the best idea for the games evaluation.

Technically I'm guessing it will happily activate on the same machine. On the legal side you will need another licence for that same situation as virtual.

Keep a fresh system image for that and blow it away whenever you choose.

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#1660828 30-Oct-2016 12:04

gzt: Dual booting windows 10 with another copy of windows 10 seems like the best idea for the games evaluation.

Technically I'm guessing it will happily activate on the same machine. On the legal side you will need another licence for that same situation as virtual.

Keep a fresh system image for that and blow it away whenever you choose.

Yes separate key. Fresh system image seems like a plan, or as others said use evaluation version and reinstall when expires is a good idea (didn't know if it was ethical or not).

Wow dual boot huh ... my laptop goes without rebooting for weeks sometimes months if i can ignore all the updates. Maybe will check out VMware. So everything works other than GPU?

Thanks very much

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#1660849 30-Oct-2016 12:57

Yep. Everything. Plus you can effectively have snapshots for free at any point in time with Player just by copying the VMware files if you are careful. VMWare Workstation has integrated snapshot features really nice. Pretty sure hyper-v on the desktop has that also, personally I found that feature clunky compared to VMware.

With snapshot/revert use you may strike trouble with some game activation in some circumstances.

I'm guessing evaluation mode is provided for evaluation of windows 10 so it's not particularly ethical to use that mode for other reasons.

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#1661365 31-Oct-2016 12:51

Personally I've now ditched VMWare Workstation on all but one of my personal systems in favour of Hyper-V, and I suspect that last one will go away next time I wipe and reload that machine. I don't really see much of a compelling case for using VMWare over Hyper-V any more, Hyper-V has matured a lot, and being able to manipulate the VM's with PowerShell is really useful. Even more so when one is free with the OS and the other several hundred dollars.

As an aside, in the enterprise I still think VMWare is best choice for the datacentre, but the gap is steadily eroding, and for anything outside the datacentre (e.g. branch servers) Hyper-V has a pretty compelling use case. At work I run over a hundred Hyper-V hosts outside the core datacentre.

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#1661412 31-Oct-2016 14:01

OK good to know!

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#1662119 1-Nov-2016 16:29

WTH I tried to click add Hyper-V n the control panel and this comes up!

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#1662183 1-Nov-2016 18:23

joker97:

WTH I tried to click add Hyper-V n the control panel and this comes up!

I don't know why Microsoft made installing .Net 3.5 on W10 such a monumental pain in the arse, but once you jump through the hoops it should be fine.

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#1662190 1-Nov-2016 18:46

It isnt, .Net 3.5 is not required for hyper-V.

Hyper-v consists of two parts, the Hypervisor which installs between your hardware and the Guest VMs which are basically just VHDs. A guest VM has access to a set of virtualised hardware that is in the host machine - but at an abstracted layer - so drivers are not the same.

There are 3 ways to connect to a VM, the first is using the hyperv console (I use when the VM is on the same machine), the second is remote desktop (for most cases as it allows multi-monitor support), and the third is a new console in one of the newer windows 10 builds (I think it was introduced in the anniversary update).

In windows 10 it is also possible to Boot to VHD (called VHD Boot) - I have not tried this, so I dont know what kind of access to hardware it has.

I run my VMs in a fairly high resolution so that kind of thing is not an issue, and I do run a few graphics programs. I would not play games on them mainly because you'd be better off using dedicated hardware that does not require a remote connection.

To back up a VM there are a couple of options, copy the VHD somewhere, take a snapshot (with the vm shutdown) or export the VM.

Licensing is based on the OS you install, so if the guest is Windows, you will need the appropriate license, Linux of course is free, so it is useful to use for figuring out how everything works.

You also get the ability to set up virtual networks as well as to configure NAT.

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#1662192 1-Nov-2016 18:55

^ That is hyper-v bare metal.

That one is different to adding the hyper-v role in windows server or adding the hyper-v role in windows desktop operating systems.

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#1662210 1-Nov-2016 19:30

Lias:

joker97:

WTH I tried to click add Hyper-V n the control panel and this comes up!

I don't know why Microsoft made installing .Net 3.5 on W10 such a monumental pain in the arse, but once you jump through the hoops it should be fine.

Ok I will try my best

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#1662245 1-Nov-2016 20:33

Ah the link from the error message linked to a KB with a different error code!

When I searched the actual error code turns out that my AV was the issue. that wasn't too bad

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