Greetings community,
Recently I bought new home computer. It’s a machine with Intel i7-5820K processor, X-99 chipset, and 32GB RAM. It came with Windows 10 Pro retail disk, but it wasn’t installed. So when they delivered it, I started installing Windows without
troubling myself what really was enabled or disabled in BIOS. Actually, not having any experience with overclocking nor with hardware in general, I asked them to set the machine so it would not be overclocked and everything to be set as normal. As a result,
my machine did not have hardware virtualization enabled, and at the moment of starting installation of Windows 10, I was not aware of that.
So I installed Windows 10 Pro x64 in order to see all that RAM. During the process, out of my sight Hyper-V was also installed.
Then I installed SQL server express, and VS2012 pro in order to be able to take my project from work and bring them home to work on them. No problem with that, everything was fine.
After that I installed VS 2015 Community in order to try and see how to make those multiplatform apps that would work on Windows 10 on desktop and phone at the same time. Unfortunately, something went wrong, and when I clicked file/new
project and chose universal template, it reported package installation error for Microsoft SDKs\NETCoreSDK, specifically Microsoft.NETCore.UniversalWindowsPlatform.5.0.0. I tried several times to reinstall SDK as well as whole Visual Studio, but nothing helped.
SO MY FIRST QUESTION: Is possible that VS2015 didn’t install properly because I had installed Windows 10 on the machine with hardware virtualization disabled?
MY SECOND QUESTION: Is enabling hardware virtualization capabilities in BIOS actual prerequisite for Windows 10 (which by default includes Hyper-V) to be properly
installed? Is Hyper-V properly installed on the machine with no hardware virtualization enabled?
Well, I gave up VS2015 until some free time comes up, to solve this and came back to VS2012 and projects that I have to accomplish for my employer. Requirement is to make some apps that would work on client machine that talk to server
machine. Having enough memory and processor power I thought that I could install one virtual machine to play the role of client machine and talk to the host that would play the role of server machine.
First I tried Microsoft’s Virtual PC, but unfortunately you cannot make network between host OS and guest OS that is hosted with MS Virtual PC. Last time when it was possible was with Windows XP as host, when you were capable of configuring
something called loopback adapter.
Then I downloaded Oracle VM Virtual Box. I installed Windows 7 Pro x32, because it didn’t wat to accept x64. Well, I tried it and it worked, but very slowly, because I was not able to give it more than one core of processor.
I browsed through Oracle’s forums and find out that in order to install 64 bits OS with more than one proc core, I have to enable hardware virtualization on my machine. They even suggested to download simple app called securable.exe which
reports three things for your machine: bit length (32-64), Hardware DEP, and Hardware Virtualization. When I started securable.exe, it reported that my machine doesn’t have Hardware Virtualization. Of course I restarted to BIOS, and enabled everything related
to HV. Still, after restart, securable.exe still reported the same thing: I don’t have HV.
So I browsed Oracle’s forums for some more info, and found out that I have to disable Hyper-V in order to get HV. Then I opened “Turn Windows features on or off” and disabled Hyper-V. After that, securable.exe reported that I have HV,
and Oracle VM Virtual Box let me to have more than one proc core, which resulted with better performance of that virtual machine.
Now, even though I have operational construct for making required apps targeted to work on Windows 7 Pro machines mostly present at my employer’s environment (we only have one new Windows 10 machine), at some moment we should upgrade to
Windows 10, so why not having prepared possibility for it. I would like to install newer Visual Studio, but it would obviously not lie down without Hyper-V, at least because it is needed for emulating windows phone, and I can foresee that I’ll be asked to
make a few simple apps for WP also. But, if I’m about to use newer VS, I’ll not be able to use Oracle’s VM and vice versa.
MY THIRD QUESTION: Is there Microsoft’s solution for virtual machine with these properties:
- It’s free for developers
- It allows me to have host and guest OS connected through local network, and allows guest OS to have internet access to update itself
- It works on Windows 10 pro x64
- If it uses Hyper-V, it does it that way, so it won’t stop Visual Studio from working properly
- It allows me to install Windows 64 bits OS as guest, particularly Windows 7 pro x64
- It allows me to allocate at least 4GB of RAM for it
- It allows me to reserve at least 2 proc core for virtual machine
Thanks for any help.