87

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?

enter image description here

Peter
  • 3
  • 2
Abhishek Kumar
  • 1,027
  • 1
  • 8
  • 11
  • 1
    This question is a duplicate of [this](https://superuser.com/questions/1556521/virtual-machine-platform-in-win-10-2004-is-hyper-v/1619173#1619173) question – Ramhound Jan 20 '21 at 12:45

1 Answers1

63

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:

Ramhound
  • 39,497
  • 34
  • 97
  • 124
  • I'm running Docker on Windows and do not have the `Windows Hypervisor Platform` enabled. The documentation https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install/ says it requires the Hyper-V feature. – Valuator Jan 28 '21 at 15:17
  • 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) – joedotnot Apr 21 '21 at 16:01
  • 3
    @joedotnot - [Before installing WSL 2, you must enable the **Virtual Machine Platform** optional feature. Your machine will require virtualization capabilities to use this feature.](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10). 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](https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%229d121625-e741-6d20-f3de-201a939290b8%22&in=body). I have my doubts the MS instructions are incorrect – Ramhound Apr 21 '21 at 17:33