Hyper-V vs Virtual Machine Platform vs Windows Hypervisor Platform settings in Programs and Features?

Question

Windows 10 shows these three separate features that seem to be the same thing or related.

• Hyper-V (note that in latest Windows 10 version this has disappeared from the "Windows Features" checklist depicted bellow); it only shows in the services list.
• Virtual Machine Platform
• Windows Hypervisor Platform

What does each setting do exactly, and how do they correlate?

Solution

How do they correlate?

They are separate independent features and do not directly correlate with one another.

What does each setting do exactly?

• Hyper-V is Microsoft's Hypervisor.

• Virtual Machine Platform - "Enables platform support for virtual machines" and is required for WSL2. Virtual Machine Platform can be used to create MSIX Application packages for an App-V or MSI.

• Windows Hypervisor Platform - "Enables virtualization software to run on the Windows hypervisor" and at one time was required for Docker on Windows. The Hypervisor platform is an API that third-party developers can use in order to use Hyper-V. Oracle VirtualBox, Docker, and QEMU are examples of these projects.

The Windows Hypervisor Platform adds an extended user-mode API for third-party virtualization stacks and applications to create and manage partitions at the hypervisor level, configure memory mappings for the partition, and create and control the execution of virtual processors.

Sources:

• Windows Hypervisor Platform

• MSIX documentation

• Why can't VirtualBox or VMware run with Hyper-V enabled on Windows 10

Comments

[Admin]

This question is a duplicate of this question

[Valuator]

I'm running Docker on Windows and do not have the Windows Hypervisor Platform enabled. The documentation docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install says it requires the Hyper-V feature.

[joedotnot]

Virtual Machine Platform - Enables platform support for virtual machines" and is required for WSL2. The preceding statement is not true as at the date of this comment - I have WSL2 running with Ubuntu, yet VMP is checked off (clearly NOT required for WSL2)

[Ramhound]

@joedotnot - Before installing WSL 2, you must enable the Virtual Machine Platform optional feature. Your machine will require virtualization capabilities to use this feature.. If the Microsoft documentation is incorrect, I would make Microsoft aware, once it's been changed I will update my question. You can report the incorrect documentation on that page here. I have my doubts the MS instructions are incorrect