As a home labber with several years under my belt, I’ve tried all sorts of virtualization platforms, container runtimes, and hypervisors across different OS families. These days, I rely on Proxmox for most tinkering experiments, with TrueNAS housing a couple of storage-heavy containers.

That said, I still use hypervisors on everyday machines occasionally when my server workstations remain inaccessible – whether it’s due to long outages in my backwater town or my botched experiments causing my network stack to go poof. Heck, I even stick to my Windows-based gaming PC when I want to spin up a disposable virtual machine for a quick project without going through the whole hog of setting it up on Proxmox’s web UI. Back in the day, I’d opt for VirtualBox, though I ended up migrating to Hyper-V after I switched to Windows 11 a few years ago. And since then, Microsoft’s flagship hypervisor has served me well.

Hyper-V is miles ahead of VirtualBox when it comes to performance

It is a type-1 hypervisor, after all

When it comes to accessibility, VirtualBox definitely earns some brownie points with its simple interface, especially when you contrast it with Hyper-V’s minimalist UI. But things are radically different on the performance front, as virtual machines deployed on Hyper-V feel a lot more responsive compared to their VirtualBox-powered counterparts. That’s mostly because Hyper-V is a type-1 hypervisor, meaning it has direct access to my system resources with minimal interference from the Windows environment on the host machine. Meanwhile, VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor, so it would run on top of my Windows 11 rig, with the OS layer causing extra overhead in my VM experiments.

Hyper-V’s superior performance is especially noticeable when I run Windows 11 VMs, as VirtualBox has always felt somewhat sluggish even with half my CPU cores and 16GB of memory assigned to the virtual machine. While it’s technically locked to the Windows family, Hyper-V works just as well with Linux and FreeBSD VMs, and it handles multi-VM projects more smoothly than its type-2 counterpart.

Hyper-V also includes extra features under the hood

That said, USB passthrough is a lot easier on VirtualBox

When it comes to advanced services, VirtualBox puts up a decent fight against Hyper-V, but ultimately loses to the sheer features available on the latter. Both support nested virtualization, but Hyper-V’s type-1 design makes virtual machine-inside-VM experiments more responsive. VirtualBox can technically be controlled with typical CLI commands, but Hyper-V has better management provisions. In fact, I often train my PowerShell skills by using custom scripts to manage the hypervisor from the Windows terminal. VirtualBox may support guest additions for VMs, but Enhanced Session Mode feels a lot snappier than the former’s console.

Better yet, Hyper-V also pairs with Windows Server setups, and although there are some caveats to using it in a dedicated home lab, this setup is really fun to experiment with. I’ve even got dedicated Windows Server 2025 and Hyper-V 2019 VMs on my Proxmox host (with nested virtualization enabled, of course), and getting them to work in tandem is pretty rewarding. But I digress…

Hyper-V had the added advantage of cluster setups. Now I’m not crazy (or rich) enough to set up a high-availability Hyper-V cluster when I’ve already built one with Proxmox. But being able to control virtual and bare-metal Hyper-V instances from one on my gaming machine makes experimenting with them a lot simpler. If you’re someone looking to build an entirely Windows-based home lab, starting with Hyper-V can help you add extra devices later down the line for a full-fledged cluster with failover provisions. There are even provisions for deploying Windows containers on Hyper-V, though Podman Desktop + WSL2 is my preferred setup for containerizing applications on Windows 11 setups.

In the end, USB passthrough is the only area where VirtualBox has a slight edge over Hyper-V. It’s technically possible to pass typical USB devices to VMs in the latter, but it involves a couple of workarounds, while VirtualBox provides simple toggles for configuring USB passthrough.

You don’t need the Pro version of Windows 11 to harness Hyper-V

Well-informed readers may have noticed that, unlike its Pro and Enterprise counterparts, Windows 11 Home doesn’t ship with Hyper-V packages. But in reality, the necessary Hyper-V files are already present on the Home edition of Microsoft’s flagship OS, and you can create a custom script to enable them. To do so, you’ll have to paste this script inside an empty Notebook document, save it with the .bat extension, and run it as an administrator:

pushd "%~dp0"
dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\*Hyper-V*.mum >hv.txt
for /f %%i in ('findstr /i . hv.txt 2^>nul') do dism /online /norestart /add-package:"%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\%%i"
del hv.txt
Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Hyper-V -All /LimitAccess /ALL
pause

After a restart, you can launch the More Windows Features menu from the Optional Features section of the System tab inside the Settings app. Then, you can enable the Hyper-V packages and reboot your PC a second time to gain access to Hyper-V. The only caveat with this method is that you won’t be able to access Windows Sandbox. But you can just as easily circumvent this whole problem by using Windows 11 Pro. Me? I'm satisfied with using Hyper-V for light server tasks, as anything even remotely demanding runs on my bulky Proxmox workstations.