Hyper-V Support?

I realize this thread is a bit old but was wondering whether any more thought has been given to add support for Hyper-V virtual environments given the purchase of VMware by Broadcom and their apparent reduced interest in supporting the end user community ?

I am doing a lot of testing right now to move all of my VMs away from VMworkstation to Hyper-V. Of course I always have the option of running Kodi under a Windows guest VM but would prefer to get to a native LibreElec solution. I was able to get Ubuntu and Slackware Linux running under Hyper-V so driver and kernel support is available.

Thanks,

Jeff

Quote from jbinkley60

I .. was wondering whether any more thought has been given to add support for Hyper-V virtual environments given the purchase of VMware by Broadcom and their apparent reduced interest in supporting the end user community ?

I can't recall the last time anyone on staff talked about using the Virtual image for development purposes, so I'm highly confident there have been zero thoughts about Hyper-V support. If people did want to run an image on something non-vmware the go-to these days would probably be Oracle Virtualbox since it's $free, already works, and doesn't require Windows. On the server side Proxmox seems to be what people are using.

Quote from chewitt

I can't recall the last time anyone on staff talked about using the Virtual image for development purposes, so I'm highly confident there have been zero thoughts about Hyper-V support. If people did want to run an image on something non-vmware the go-to these days would probably be Oracle Virtualbox since it's $free, already works, and doesn't require Windows. On the server side Proxmox seems to be what people are using.

Well I understand your perspective and I have some friends running Proxmox servers as they moved away from ESX and similar. I've got large machines running Windows with over 1PB of RAID and other hardware which runs great on Windows 11 Pro as hosts. Converting everything to Proxmox would be quite an undertaking. A move from VMworkstation to Hyper-V makes sense for me and is actually less costly since no more VMware licenses and I already own Windows Pro with Hype-V support. I think there is more Hyper-V out there than most folks realize, including most Fortune 100 companies run it extensively. I've worked for a few of them.

Anyway, if you change your mind, I'd be happy to test. I don't think it would be a heavy lift to add the libraries for Hyper-V but that's easy for me to say, since I wouldn't be doing it. The fact that Ubuntu and Slackware support it already (I presume Debian does too, I've just never tested yet) lead me to believe that it isn't a major uplift.

I may try keeping one VMworkstation machine running and be able to switch back and forth for testing. I'll give a shot at nested virtualization and load VMworkstation on a Windows 10 Guest VM under Hyper-V. Supposedly nested virtualization will work but I suspect I'll run into video driver issues for Kodi at that point. We'll see.

Thanks,

Jeff

I wanted to take a minute and provide some updates here on Hyper-V and virtualized Libreelec instances. From my testing I was able to get a Windows Hyper-V guest working with Vmworkstation running in the guest machine (i.e. basically nested hypervisors) with Libreelec virtual machines running under VMworkstation. I wasn't expecting great performance but just looking for functionality. In the end I could not get the Libreelec OVAs to run due to a lack of graphics card pass-through from the host through the Hyper-V hypervisor. Supposedly Hyper-V can do this via GPU partitioning but I ran out of energy to figure this out and the overall complexity of maintaining nested hypervisors wasn't exciting me.

So I went down another route of running Hyper-V along side of VMworkstation on the same host. It's a much simpler approach and with Hyper-V being a Type 1 hypervisor and VMworkstation being a Type 2, it should work. At first it wouldn't work until I found out that I needed to enable a Windows feature called "virtual machine hosting." This adds hypervisor extensions to support Type 1 and Type 2 running together. Once I enabled this feature Vmworkstation fired right up next to Hyper-V and the Libreelec OVAs came right up with full graphics and everything.

So now I have the Hyper-V machines running as my main machines (after converting over my old VMware VMs to Hyper-V VMs) and I am running Vmworkstation just to handle the Libreelec testing VMs. I am surprised so far with performance and stability of them both running at the same time. The Libreelec OVAs are a little slower than when Hyper-V wasn't enabled on the host machine but the performance is reasonable, especially for development testing.

Thanks,

Jeff