In yesterday’s post I described that for my purposes it was still necessary to run VMware Workstation sometimes despite having Client Hyper-V installed on my Windows 8 machine.

What you have to keep in mind though, is that you’re already running a hypervisor when you have Client Hyper-V installed in Windows 8. Installing and running VMware Workstation might cause problems. So unfortunately you cannot run them at the same time. This is also true for other virtualization products like by example virtualbox.

As a workaround you can either uninstall or (temporarily) disable Hyper-V. When you want to switch between Hyper-V and VMware Workstation it is ofcourse best to just temporarily disable Hyper-V.

In this forum post, a couple of methods are described to (temporarily) disable Hyper-V. It includes creating a seperate boot menu entry to boot with Hyper-V disabled and modifying the setting either through registry or a command. All methods do require a reboot however.

PS:

• This kind of configuration is ofcourse not supported and should only be used for testing purposes in non production environments.
• Depending on both your hardware and what your planning to do, you might also want to consider:
  • Running VMware ESXi from a USB stick
  • Running Windows 8 from a USB stick with Windows To Go (WTG).
• It should also work on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 and up, but I haven’t tested it.