One the biggest issues I had with Windows 10 was when it said I had to uninstall VMware since it wasn’t compatible with the OS. Thus a perfectly good license was wasted. I figured I would just use Hyper-V going forward only to realize that Hyper V wasn’t supported on Windows 10 Home edition.
For the longest time this was an irritant for me since I do a lot of RnD and needed a way to build and destroy builds at will. Since it wasn’t possible on the physical hardware I ended up using Docker or Azure VMs when there was anything I needed to RnD. This worked well until I needed a build of a OS which was no longer supported and couldn’t find an image in Docker or Azure.
Enter the PowerShell command which enables Hyper V even on Windows 10 Home. While I will always be a MS guy things like this make me feel for the open source community and I get why for every Steve Jobs there is a Woz. The true geek will always find a way in spite of the marketing teams best efforts to kill open source. Anyway regardless of the rant here is what you need to do
Copy paste the below command into a Bat file and execute as administrator followed by a restart.
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
UPDATE
This solution does not work for Windows 11 since MS has removed some packages and therefore the Hyper V gets installed but wont start. You will get the error “Please check Virtual machine Manager service is running” . There is a solution available on forums regarding vmcompute,.exe Code SafeGaurd permissions being bypassed in PowerShell. They do not work for Windows Home because the package itself is missing. To verify check if you have a Service called Hyper V Virtual Machine Manager under services.msc
The alternative for users is to download VM ware workstation which is now available for free for all users from the VMWare Website. Please note you need to register in order to download.