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Virtual Machines on Windows with Hyper-V Manager

shabaz

I do not know if this is common knowledge or not, but I just discovered that Windows 11 (and perhaps Windows 10) has VM capability that is easy to use, and free.

I used VMWare Workstation in the past, but that is pricey (and needs upgrading every couple of years because it inevitably stops working as Windows evolves). I never liked Oracle's VirtualBox.

If you need to spin up (say) Linux quickly, then it is just 5-10 minutes away from scratch. The information is here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/quick-start/quick-create-virtual-machine

I probably will not use it regularly, since I already have Linux on a separate Intel box, (and several Raspberry Pi's that can be brought up within seconds) but it could come in handy from time to time, for instance, for testing code.

A minor annoyance is that it will not run VMWare Workstation-created VMs (there may be conversion utilities, but they are third-party, and I couldn't find one that looked usable and free), but I can live with that.

image

It puts the virtual hard disks here by default:

image

The checkpoint feature is neat; I don't recall if VMWare Workstation ever had that. Here you can see I went back to an earlier checkpoint (it retains them all, in a tree):

image

Disk after creating those checkpoints:

image

  • Ow, that's straightforward.

    I have a similar Linux farm as you. PIs, BBs and an Intel laptop all running some Linux.
    On my Windows laptop, I run Ubuntu under WSL - good enough to run build/make scripts designed for Linux.

    The hyper-V is definitely a good option for a full Linux VM.  

  • I use it regularly. It is Type 1 hypervisor which is more performant than type 2 hypervisors like VirtualBox. It is much faster because very few virtual hardware is emulated. The only disadvatange is that virtual GPU with virtual display is slow and laggy. I recommend using SSH and VNC for accessing Linux machines and RDP for windows machines instead of using virtual screen.

  • in reply to misaz

    I rarely use the Linux desktop too. Mostly SSH using the excellent SecureCRT, and coding using Visual Code on Windows, remotely connected to the source code using the built-in VS Code Server that it automatically installs to the Linux box. I'm super-happy with this combination, I feel really productive with it.