Eh, I was in this same boat as a VMWare Workstation user -- I haven't upgraded my license recently, and v14 has a number of bugs that are very annoying -- but at this point with tools like Windows Sandbox in 1903, various Hyper-V/Manager improvements, I went ahead and caved and went and enabled HyperV and removed Workstation. The fact HyperV manager can now do easy one-click installs of Ubuntu, etc, is nice.

At this rate -- for my uses, anyway -- I expect Microsoft to update and expand Hyper-V (and Sandbox, and WSL v2) in a much more timely fashion than Workstation, especially considering it's a core technology of theirs (across desktop and also server). On top of that, VirtualBox and QEMU now support the new Hypervisor APIs[1], so Workstation is the odd one out in my mind.

In the end between updating my license and sticking with this, I haven't gone back yet, but we'll see once I put Hyper-V in 1903 through the motions...

[1] I actually recently installed QEMU for Windows, followed some of those Rust OS tutorials, and booted my own disk image in QEMU's graphical mode, using the WHXP mode in QEMU (-accel whxp on Windows, instead of -accel kvm on Linux) and it all worked like a charm. Amazing how well QEMU seems to work these days on Windows.

Just adding that virtualbox 6 works(ish) [1] with hyper-v thanks to the use of the virtualization API [2] to setup the VM.

[1] https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=90853 [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/api/

AFAIK that does not like VirtualBox 6 works with Hyper-V but it's like running Hyper-V instead of VirtualBox. Therefore there is a lot of compatibility issue.

This is how hypervisor nesting works, a lot of issues, trust me.

One reason I've turned off Hyper-V is that I've noticed my CPU either doesn't downclock like normal when Hyper-V is enabled, or the OS doesn't report it as doing so if it actually does. Anyone noticed this? Does Hyper-V affect battery etc. in ways like this?

I'm not sure if it will be Hyper-V? Currently to use Hyper-V you have to have a non-home license for Windows, though maybe they will change that for this.

I hope you don't have to have a non-home license for Windows to run WSL 2, that would be really annoying.

Yes this is quite concerning for users of WSL on non-Azure clouds or on systems like Qubes. Hopefully WSLv1 will continue to be supported in the medium-term - Microsoft have put quite a bit of engineering time behind it.

Whoa. Does this mean they're essentially forcing WSL users into Azure this way?

The term "VM" is greatly overloaded.

It's not running in a Hyper-V virtual machine, just like the Java virtual machine isn't a Hyper-V virtual machine.

It's more like how 16-bit Windows executables ran on 32-bit Windows - in a very thin "virtual machine" long before hypervisors were a thing.

Ouch...

I guess there is no hope that one will be able to continue to use WSL v1?

> I guess there is no hope that one will be able to continue to use WSL v1?

Looks like that guess is wrong:

“WSL 2 is a new version of the architecture that powers the Windows Subsystem for Linux to run ELF64 Linux binaries on Windows. This new architecture changes how these Linux binaries interact with Windows and your computer’s hardware, but still provides the same user experience as in WSL 1 (the current widely available version). Individual Linux distros can be run either as a WSL 1 distro, or as a WSL 2 distro, can be upgraded or downgraded at any time, and you can run WSL 1 and WSL 2 distros side by side. WSL 2 uses an entirely new architecture that uses a real Linux kernel.”

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/

The article states they’ll live side by side.