Are you planning to install Hyper-V on your Windows 8 Pro or Windows 8 Enterprise desktop and use for your SharePoint virtualization technology? If you are, you may want to ensure your CPU and hardware supports some of the basic requirements for Hyper-V before it’s too late. As a SharePoint 2013 VM builder, you may be more focused on the RAM requirements but CPU requirements are equally valid if you are planning to use Hyper-V for your virtualization technology.

I have recently tried to activate Hyper-V role on my Windows 8 Enterprise desktop and ran into issue of Hyper-V manager couldn’t connect to local host. As I tried to force local connection, I was welcomed by very criptive message – An error occurred while attempting to connect to server. Check that the virtual machine management service is running and that you are authorized to connect to the server – Hyper-V has not been installed on computer.

This has definitely pointed me in the right direction. As I looked further in the Windows Feature On or Off program, “Hyper-V Platform” was grayed out. It means, Hyper-V wasn’t installed on my host machine. This is such a weird situation.

Being new to Hyper-V installation process, quick “Google” brought me to multiple places and all of them pointed to check my computer System Info to see if Hyper-V can be supported by my hardware and CPU. According to reference article, Hyper-V requires SLAT (Second Level Address Translation) feature of CPU. Every Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 CPU supports SLAT but my current laptop’s Core 2 Duo CPU doesn’t support it. That tells me why I couldn’t install Hyper-V role on my laptop hardware.

To verify if you can install Hyper-V on the desktop, all the four options in Hyper-V requirements in the System Info should be Yes.

Here are the basic hardware requirements to run Hyper-V role on the Windows 8 Host servers.

• Windows 8 Pro or Windows 8 Enterprise, 64 bit version
• CPU should support Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)
• At minimum 4G RAM
• Update BIOS and enable virtualization.

Having said that, please beware before buying new laptop or aftermarket laptop and check basic hardware requirements for Hyper-V to run Hyper-V virtualization feature on windows 8 desktops or laptops.

Resources

• Hyper-V: List of SLAT-Capable CPUs for Hosts – http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1401.hyper-v-list-of-slat-capable-cpus-for-hosts.aspx
• Installing Hyper-V on Windows 8 Pro (Great Article) – http://blogs.msdn.com/b/olivnie/archive/2013/01/18/hyper-v-on-client-windows-8-pro.aspx
• How to Install or Enable Hyper-V Virtualization in Windows 8 –http://www.howtogeek.com/76532/how-to-install-or-enable-hyper-v-virtualization-in-windows-8/