Hyper-V improvements

The Hyper-V configuration version was increased to 8.2, and with that increase there are some new features within Hyper-V in the Fall Creators Update.

  • Virtual battery support for Hyper-V: When using Hyper-V on laptops, your guest OS was always agnostic about the state of your battery. Hyper-V can now expose a virtual battery to virtual machines. When enabled, you can see your host computer’s battery power state inside your guest virtual machines.
  • New Hyper-V easy export: Exporting a virtual machine Hyper-V no longer uses an XML file for configuration information since 1703 but the new binary VMCX file. The improved VMCX file now includes information about network configuration also, and you can easily import VMs now with the use of the VMCX, including the necessary virtual switch configuration. This VMCX feature is also used for the new sharing feature, which additionally compresses your files:

  • New Hyper-V sharing feature: The virtual machine connection window toolbar has a new icon on the right side called Share.

Moving virtual machines to another PC is made easier with this new VM-sharing feature. To speed up the process and reduce the size during transport, your VM will be compressed. It will compress the virtual machine files and all its configuration into a single .vmcz file. On your destination PC running Windows 10, you can double-click on this file to start easy-importing the virtual machine. As described in the easy export section, this file will also include network information.

  • Revert VM enabled by default in Hyper-V: Hyper-V already had for some time a feature called Revert VM a.k.a. Checkpoints, but it was disabled by default. Hyper-V now automatically enables the Checkpoint feature with the Standard checkpoints option for every new VM and creates snapshots of your VM. The green Revert icon will be now available by default and no longer grayed out due to unconfigured checkpoints. A snapshot is taken on every start of your machine or when you manually create a checkpoint within a right-click context menu in Hyper-V Manger. Now you can easily revert your VM’s state. If you do not want this revert feature enabled, go to Settings | Checkpoints and uncheck enable checkpoints.
Consult the whitepaper/known issues section for software running inside VMs with the checkpoint feature enabled. For some products, such as databases, you need to change Standard checkpoints to Production checkpoints using guest operating system backup technology. Some products such as domain controllers do not work well with checkpoints at all, and therefore the feature should be disabled on these special VMs.