Hi Janne,
It seems there are some workarounds about it. At docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/w... it says:
Some 3rd party applications cannot work when Hyper-V is in use, which means they will not be able to run when WSL 2 is enabled, such as VMware and VirtualBox. However, recently both VirtualBox and VMware have released versions that support Hyper-V and WSL2! You can learn more about VirtualBox's changes here and VMware's changes here.
It seems that page has been last updated about a year ago. The updates they refer to are things that I've already found to be broken.
6.0.0 from 2018 was supposed to fix VirtualBox with Hyper-V, it doesn't, it's really broken, and the entire VirtualBox community seems to know this as they typically suggest removing Hyper-V as the only solution to getting VirtualBox to work when your computer has Hyper-V enabled.
It seems you're only spreading old marketing propaganda from Microsoft without doing any actual research on it.
Yes, at some point they thought they could make it work, Windows implemented some APIs that were supposed to make it possible, but those have repeatedly broken and VirtualBox has not worked with Hyper-V enabled a little while after the initial successful beta tests.
virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog:
VirtualBox 6.1.4 (released February 19 2020)
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
Windows host: Restore the ability to run VMs through Hyper-V, at the expense of performance
Changelog is VirtualBox's own changelog, their own promise! so how come it is Microsoft's old propaganda? If VirtualBox is broken it is not Microsoft's responsibility but Oracle's.
If Microsoft breaks their APIs likely to intentionally break the compatibility with 3rd party virtualization software, how is that Oracle's fault?
And you linked to docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/w... a page last updated a year ago. A page which still made invalid claims about "recently both VirtualBox and VMware have released versions that support Hyper-V and WSL2" - out of date propaganda. The links on that page also link to VirtualBox 6.0 changelog - and all versions of VirtualBox 6.0 still fail to work under Hyper-V.
It's interesting that maybe VirtualBox has finally managed to fix the compatibility even without Microsoft's help using their proprietary intentionally broken APIs, but this might not be a long-lived solution and there is no sense in building any of your systems to depend now on Hyper-V since there are no guarantees it will not break again in the future.
Also this is far from the only issue with Hyper-V, though it was the most significant one to my work.
Yeah, I can confirm the performance hit is severe. Had WSL2 setup and VirtualBox 6.1.6 I was able to start my Win7 VM, but since VirtualBox was forced to use Hyper-V the VM never made it past the Win7 start up animation after 10-15 minutes.
Ended up reverting back to WSL1 to get the performance back on my VMs.
Hi Janne,
It seems there are some workarounds about it. At docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/w... it says:
Some 3rd party applications cannot work when Hyper-V is in use, which means they will not be able to run when WSL 2 is enabled, such as VMware and VirtualBox. However, recently both VirtualBox and VMware have released versions that support Hyper-V and WSL2! You can learn more about VirtualBox's changes here and VMware's changes here.
It seems that page has been last updated about a year ago. The updates they refer to are things that I've already found to be broken.
6.0.0 from 2018 was supposed to fix VirtualBox with Hyper-V, it doesn't, it's really broken, and the entire VirtualBox community seems to know this as they typically suggest removing Hyper-V as the only solution to getting VirtualBox to work when your computer has Hyper-V enabled.
It seems you're only spreading old marketing propaganda from Microsoft without doing any actual research on it.
Yes, at some point they thought they could make it work, Windows implemented some APIs that were supposed to make it possible, but those have repeatedly broken and VirtualBox has not worked with Hyper-V enabled a little while after the initial successful beta tests.
Spreading old marketing propaganda? Easy please..
virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog:
VirtualBox 6.1.4 (released February 19 2020)
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
Windows host: Restore the ability to run VMs through Hyper-V, at the expense of performance
Changelog is VirtualBox's own changelog, their own promise! so how come it is Microsoft's old propaganda? If VirtualBox is broken it is not Microsoft's responsibility but Oracle's.
If Microsoft breaks their APIs likely to intentionally break the compatibility with 3rd party virtualization software, how is that Oracle's fault?
And you linked to docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/w... a page last updated a year ago. A page which still made invalid claims about "recently both VirtualBox and VMware have released versions that support Hyper-V and WSL2" - out of date propaganda. The links on that page also link to VirtualBox 6.0 changelog - and all versions of VirtualBox 6.0 still fail to work under Hyper-V.
It's interesting that maybe VirtualBox has finally managed to fix the compatibility even without Microsoft's help using their proprietary intentionally broken APIs, but this might not be a long-lived solution and there is no sense in building any of your systems to depend now on Hyper-V since there are no guarantees it will not break again in the future.
Also this is far from the only issue with Hyper-V, though it was the most significant one to my work.
People are also reporting that the performance hit is severe, which is unlikely to be accidental.
Yeah, I can confirm the performance hit is severe. Had WSL2 setup and VirtualBox 6.1.6 I was able to start my Win7 VM, but since VirtualBox was forced to use Hyper-V the VM never made it past the Win7 start up animation after 10-15 minutes.
Ended up reverting back to WSL1 to get the performance back on my VMs.
Oh wow, that's worse than I thought .. I was just considering testing it out in the coming weeks for myself - thanks for saving me the effort!