How to Completely Disable ‘Hyper-V’ (Virtualization) System-Wide in Windows 11

Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise editions include a native Type-1 hypervisor known as Hyper-V. When enabled, Hyper-V runs directly on the system hardware beneath the operating system itself, allowing you to create and run highly efficient virtual machines (VMs) such as Ubuntu Linux or older versions of Windows. Even if you don’t actively run VMs, features like the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Windows Sandbox rely on the Hyper-V architecture to function.

However, Hyper-V acts as a monopolistic lock on the CPU’s hardware virtualization extensions (VT-x for Intel, AMD-V for AMD). If you attempt to install a third-party, Type-2 hypervisor like VMware Workstation Pro, VirtualBox, or the Android Studio Emulator, they will instantly crash or run at catastrophically slow speeds because the Windows Hyper-V layer is blocking their direct access to the CPU virtualization flags. If you need to run specialized virtual machines in VMware or VirtualBox, you must completely disable the native Windows Hyper-V platform.

Disabling Hyper-V via Windows Features

You can uninstall the hypervisor layer by modifying your core Windows Features.

1. Click the Start button on your taskbar, type Turn Windows features on or off, and press Enter to launch the applet.
2. A small “Windows Features” dialogue box will appear, populated with a list of system components.
3. Scroll down and locate the folder named Hyper-V.
4. Completely uncheck the box next to Hyper-V. (Ensure that both sub-folders, “Hyper-V Management Tools” and “Hyper-V Platform,” are also unchecked).
5. Scroll further down the list and locate Virtual Machine Platform and Windows Hypervisor Platform.
6. Uncheck both of these boxes as well, as they are helper components for the core hypervisor.
7. Click OK. Windows will spend a few moments searching for the required files and applying the changes.
8. Click Restart now when prompted.

Upon reboot, the Windows kernel will no longer launch the underlying hypervisor layer. Your operating system now has direct, bare-metal access to the CPU, and the hardware virtualization extensions are completely freed up, allowing VMware Workstation or VirtualBox to run third-party virtual machines with maximum performance.