Using Hyper-V Virtual Machines on Windows 11

Introduction

I recently wanted to create a virtual machine to test a project. I switched from VirtualBox to VMware, and the latter was pretty decent.

However, neither of them could enable AMD-V/RVI Virtualize. It suddenly dawned on me that I had enabled WSL in order to use Docker Desktop, and WSL is based on Hyper-V.

Once these features are turned on, the Windows system itself runs on top of the Hyper-V hypervisor.

In that case, VMware is essentially just another VM running on top of Hyper-V. It cannot punch through Hyper-V to access the underlying hardware virtualization instruction set (AMD-V), so it cannot provide nested virtualization to the VMs inside it.

The impact

1. Limited functionality: You cannot install and run KVM, Docker, or another virtual machine inside a VMware VM.
2. Performance overhead: Because VMware no longer accesses hardware directly and instead runs through the Windows Hypervisor Platform, VMs may run slightly slower.

No wonder the Linux desktop I installed felt extremely laggy—enabling 3D acceleration didn't help either.

In that case, I might as well try Windows's native Hyper-V VMs.

Enabling Hyper-V Manager

Note that only Pro and higher editions have this feature; Home edition does not.

Press Win + R, type optionalfeatures and press Enter

In the list that pops up, find Hyper-V.

Make sure both Hyper-V Management Tools and Hyper-V Platform are checked

Windows Admin Center

Official docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/manage/windows-admin-center/overview

Windows Admin Center is Microsoft's next-generation server and system management platform.

It implements graphical management by calling the underlying Hyper-V role.

You can install it directly with winget

winget install Microsoft.WindowsAdminCenter

After installation, a browser page will open

Enter your computer username and password here to log in

The username here needs to include the computer name. You can open PowerShell and run the following command to see the full username:

whoami

In actual testing, though, something went wrong somewhere and I could never log in on that page. I didn't really want to mess with it, so I just used the system's Hyper-V console instead.

Hyper-V Manager

After the enabling steps above, this manager is already in the system—just open it.

The steps for creating a VM are similar to VMware/VirtualBox. This is a VM I already created, with Debian 13 installed and configured.

Wrap-up

The remaining steps (such as choosing a Debian desktop environment, system configuration, installing OpenClaw, etc.) aren't closely related to Hyper-V, so I'll cover them in a separate article.