Windows 10 shows these three separate features that seem to be the same thing or related.

• Hyper-V (note that in latest Windows 10 version this has disappeared from the "Windows Features" checklist depicted bellow); it only shows in the services list.
• Virtual Machine Platform
• Windows Hypervisor Platform

What does each setting do exactly, and how do they correlate?

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1 Answer

How do they correlate?

They are separate independent features and do not directly correlate with one another.

What does each setting do exactly?

• Hyper-V is Microsoft's Hypervisor.

• Virtual Machine Platform - "Enables platform support for virtual machines" and is required for WSL2. Virtual Machine Platform can be used to create MSIX Application packages for an App-V or MSI.

• Windows Hypervisor Platform - "Enables virtualization software to run on the Windows hypervisor" and at one time was required for Docker on Windows. The Hypervisor platform is an API that third-party developers can use in order to use Hyper-V. Oracle VirtualBox, Docker, and QEMU are examples of these projects.

The Windows Hypervisor Platform adds an extended user-mode API for third-party virtualization stacks and applications to create and manage partitions at the hypervisor level, configure memory mappings for the partition, and create and control the execution of virtual processors.

Sources:

• Windows Hypervisor Platform

• MSIX documentation

• Why can't VirtualBox or VMware run with Hyper-V enabled on Windows 10

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