Windows 10 Home - 1809 Virtualization Features

Question

I'm running Windows 10 Home edition. Recently updated to 1809. Found a few new features and services related to virtualization. Does this mean Hyper-V is now available for Home edition too? What do these additional features do?

Answer 1

According to this article seems that it is possible to have Hyper-V in Home edition: https://www.itechtics.com/enable-hyper-v-windows-10-home/

They provide a "Hyper-V-Enabler.bat" which would enable the feature:

pushd "%~dp0"
dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\*Hyper-V*.mum >hyper-v.txt
for /f %%i in ('findstr /i . hyper-v.txt 2^>nul') do dism /online /norestart /add-package:"%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\%%i"
del hyper-v.txt
Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Hyper-V -All /LimitAccess /ALL
pause

But, since you already have the services listed in your installation, probably you don't need this anymore and you should be able to just use Hyper-V Manager.

Answer 2

In simple terms, these features allow you to run another machine on top of your current machine. Software like Virtual Box, VMware enable you to create and run these machines. To be able to run these software (and the virtual machines created by these software) on your machine:

1. Your hardware needs to support virtualization technology.
2. If the hardware supports the virtualization technology, it needs to be enabled in the System BIOS settings first.
3. Once the Virtualization is enabled in BIOS you can run the virtual machine with the help of this feature.

You can find more details here:

How to install a virtual machine in Windows 10

Create a Virtual Machine with Hyper-V

Hyper-V on Windows 10

Windows Hypervisor Platform

Answer 3

Yes, it is more than possible to use Hyper-V on any version of Windows 10 Home as long as virtualization is enabled in BIOS and a 64 bit CPU. I even use it on my machine along with other Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise "Exclusives" including the msg command, gpedit, and much more. Just run a similar script as the one mentioned by user2380383 but make sure it is ran AS ADMINISTRATOR

Answer 4

Unfortunately, No.

These features enable features that I'm not sure what they do. I think they'd be for compatibility things for other VM Hypervisors, like Virtualbox or VMWare.

If you want to use Hyper-V, you will either have to downgrade to Windows 8 (which I know NOBODY wants to do), or upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, which will put a $100 dent in your wallet, which isn't worth it if you're only looking for Hyper-V.

If you want to do virtualization and VMs with Windows 10 Home, use either VMWare Workstation 15 Player or Oracle VM VirtualBox, both of which are free, but the latter of which I prefer.

Good luck,

-Chris.