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Enable Hyper-V on Windows 10/11 Home: Step-by-Step Guide

Hyper-V, by default, is only available to Windows Pro/Enterprise edition users. However, you can enable Hyper-V in Windows 10/11 Home Edition with a simple trick. This article shows you how.

The Hyper-V application in Windows allows you to create virtual machines to install and run operating systems without affecting the current host OS. It is a built-in alternative for third-party virtualization software like VMware and VirtualBox. In fact, most system devs use Hyper-V daily to create and manage virtual machines.

However useful it is, Hyper-V is considered a Pro feature, and as a result, it is only available in Pro and Enterprise editions. That being said, all the building blocks required to turn on and use Hyper-V in Windows Home edition are already present. That means, with a simple trick, you can enable Hyper-V in Windows 10/11 Home Edition as long as it passes the hardware requirements.

Here’s how to do it.

Table of contents:

  1. Hardware requirements
  2. Enable Hyper-V in Windows 10/11 Home

Hardware Requirements

Being a hypervisor, Hyper-V has strict hardware requirements that your computer should meet. Otherwise, you cannot enable or use Hyper-V. Here is the list of all the mandatory Hyper-V system requirements:

  1. At least 8 GB RAM (Memory).
  2. Supports hardware virtualization.
  3. Hardware virtualization should be enabled in BIOS/UEFI. You can easily check if virtualization is enabled by opening the task manager and going to the Performance tab.
  4. Supports Hardware Enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP). If your computer supports hardware virtualization, it most likely supports DEP.
  5. A 64-bit processor. If you are using an older 64-bit processor, make sure it supports Second Level Translation Address (SLTA).

Enable Hyper-V in Windows 10/11 Home

Follow the below steps to enable Hyper-V in Windows 10/11 Home Edition.

To enable Hyper-V in Windows Home, we have to download a few essential packages from Microsoft using the DISM (Deployment Image Servicing and Management) command. Thankfully, we can use a simple script that is available on the official Microsoft Docs GitHub page (https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/Virtualization-Documentation/issues/915).

To get started, right-click on your desktop and select the “New > Text document” option to create a new text file. After that, open the file and paste the below script in it. Press the “Ctrl + S” keyboard shortcut or select “File > Save” to save the file. Close the text file after saving it.

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
batch script to enable hyper-v on Windows 10 or 11 home edition

Now, rename the text file to “enable-hyper-v.bat” (without quotes). Don’t forget to replace the .txt extension with .bat. You can rename a file by selecting it and pressing the F2 key or right-clicking on it and selecting the Rename option at the top of the context menu.

rename text file

After creating the file, right-click on the batch file and click on the “Run as administrator” option.

run batch file to enable hyper-v on Windows 10 or 11 home edition

The above action will run the batch file with admin rights. When prompted for restart, type “Y” in the command window and press the Enter button.

Until this point, we’ve only installed packages required for Hyper-V. Now we need to enable Hyper-V. For that, press the Start key, search for “Turn Windows features on or off,” and click on the result. You can also open this window using the “optionalfeatures” Run command (Win + R).

open optional features

This will show all the optional features you can enable on your Windows PC. Scroll down, select the “Hyper-V” checkbox, and click/tap on the “Ok” button.

select hyper-v checkbox

Windows will now make the necessary changes to enable Hyper-V. Once that is done, you will see a prompt to restart your computer. Press the “Restart now” button.

click restart now button

After restarting the computer, Hyper-V is enabled. You can open the Hyper-V application by searching for it in the Start menu. To get started, try installing Windows 11 in Hyper-V.

open hyper-v

That is all. It is that easy to turn on Hyper-V on Windows 10/11 Home Edition.

I hope this simple and easy Windows how-to guide helped you.

If you are stuck or need help, email me, and I will try to help as much as possible.

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