Visual Studio 2013, Hyper-V And VMWare

We are big into doing all our development work on VMs and have been using VMWare for almost 5 years now. We've got a fantastic VMWare ESXi server with loads of RAM, CPUs, disk space and a lot of VMs. It's a great setup.

In January, I got a new Dell Venue 11 Pro with Windows 8.1. The thing is a bit buggy, but Dell is slowly taking care of some of those issues ... but I like having a nice small tablet for portability reasons. The resolution could be better, not so damn small for my aging eyes ... but that's why I use two external monitors!!

A few months later, I thought that now that I have a Win 8 machine, I should go ahead and load up Visual Studio 2013. I was not going to be doing any actual development on my Venue, but it's always good to have VS available locally (not on a remote VM) to be able to look at or test something quickly, while I'm away from my network (and my VMs are inaccessible). While in the process of doing that, I figured I'd go ahead and install everything. I thought that perhaps I might want to take a look at Windows Phone apps and see what that was all about ... you never know when you might come up with the next killer phone app (although I have never written any phone apps and, in fact, I do not as yet even own a smart phone). Unfortunately, when you install the stuff for Windows Phone, it also installs Hyper-V and I don't think that it asked me or warned me about that ... it just went and did it. Kinda pissed me off a little bit.

Why is that a problem, you might ask? Well, it didn't interfere with my development work at all ... all my development VMs are accessed via RDP. However, I did have a few other things virtualized that weren't work related ... like my old desktop computer that was starting to have issues. My Quicken and TurboTax were on there and it was easy enough to create a VM. I didn't want to put these types of personal VMs on our work ESXi server, so I put it on a USB drive and then I didn't care if my old desktop died or not (in fact, I shut it down and have not started it up since). I have been doing my Quicken and TurboTax from the VM ever since. But ooops! Along comes Hyper-V and now I can't open my VM with VMWare Player anymore! Damn!

So, now what? A bunch of Googling commenced and I eventually found that I could disable Hyper-V easily enough. I ended up following the advice at this link : http://empiricalmusing.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=25

Basically, here are the steps:

1. Open Hyper-V manager and "stop service" on the right panel,

2. Then at an elevated command prompt, run the following command:

          bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

This will disable Hyper-v at an elevated command prompt

To enable Hyper-v to use Hyper-V again, at an elevated command prompt, type:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

You'll probably have to reboot in order for changes to take effect.