hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can set up your very own virtual machine on windows 10. we’re going to use something called hyper-v to do that but first what is a virtual machine so i have this computer sitting in back of me that’s my computer a virtual machine is kind of like having another computer but instead of being another physical computer it’s another virtual computer i can install whatever operating system i want on that computer i can put another copy of windows 10 on i could put mac os on or even linux i could go ahead i could install whatever applications on that new virtual machine and i could even open whatever files i want now i did a video a little while back on the windows sandbox and if you watch that video this probably sounds very similar if you haven’t watched it i’ve also included a link down below in the description and with the windows sandbox that’s a very lightweight virtual machine so you can launch another copy of windows 10 you can install apps you could open up files and once you close it down that virtual machine goes away none of those apps or files persist if let’s say you open the sandbox again with hyper-v it’s kind of like the sandbox but it offers a lot more functionality if you install apps or if you open files those persist between your different sessions also you have access to a lot more settings you can decide how much memory or cpu you want to allocate to your virtual machine so it has quite a bit of functionality first we’re going to look at how you can first off check your system to make sure your system requirements are sufficient to run hyper-v and then we’re going to look at how you can enable hyper-v and then we’ll set up our very first virtual machine all right well why don’t we jump on the computer and let’s get started here i am on my windows 10 pc and first off let’s check to make sure that your computer qualifies for running hyper-v to do that let’s go down to the taskbar and within the search field let’s type in system information next let’s click on the best match this opens up system information and you can see all sorts of information about your computer now there are two things here that we’re interested in up at the very top you want to check the os name that you have to be able to run hyper-v you need either windows 10 professional or enterprise if you have home unfortunately you won’t be able to run it but you can upgrade very easily and in a moment i’ll show you how you can do that along with that right down here under system type you also need to have an x64 based pc if you have a relatively new computer you’ll likely qualify there is one more thing you need in place but we won’t be able to check that here you also need to make sure that within your bios you have virtualization set to enabled now how do you check your bios and how do you even get there well when you boot up your computer you’ve probably seen text before that says press the f12 key or the escape key to enter setup when you press that you’ll see an option for virtualization and you just have to make sure that’s enabled with my computer it was already enabled by default so i didn’t even have to do that step with that now out of the way hopefully you qualify but let’s say that you have windows 10 home and you’d really like to run virtualization on your computer like i said it’s pretty easy to upgrade if you already have windows 10 pro feel free to jump forward to the next chapter to upgrade to windows 10 pro let’s go down to the taskbar and within the search field type in activation once you type in activation let’s click on the best match this will open up the activation screen for windows and if you have windows 10 home here at the bottom you’ll see an option that allows you to upgrade to professional when you click on this link it’ll take you to the microsoft store and then you can upgrade it costs about 99 to upgrade so it is somewhat expensive but you do get some additional functionality not only can you set up virtual machines like hyper-v and sandbox but you can also do things like a remote desktop this allows you to connect to other computers also you can encrypt your hard drive using bitlocker now for the typical home user these things might not be necessary but if you feel like you’re a pro user and you want some additional capabilities i’d recommend going forward and getting pro okay so we’re finally ready to turn on hyper-v to do that let’s go down to the taskbar and within the search field type in turn windows features on or off right here let’s click on the best match this opens up a prompt with windows features and there are a ton of different windows features here and surprisingly if you look over here many of these are turned off by default if you’re wondering why that is well it’s probably functionality that a few people use but it doesn’t make sense to turn on for everyone right here in the initial view right near the top we’ll see an option for hyper-v and by default it’s turned off let’s click into this box and check it also earlier in this video i mentioned that there is a lightweight virtual machine called the sandbox if we scroll all the way down this list you can enable that as well if you want to play around with it now once again i’ve included a link to a video in the description if you want to learn more just about the sandbox now that we have all of the appropriate checkboxes checked let’s click on ok if this is your first time doing it you’ll likely also have to reboot your computer so go through the reboot and then rejoin this video let’s now click on ok now that you’ve rebooted your machine we’re just about ready to create our very first virtual machine right down here on the taskbar let’s go into the search field and then type in hyper-v manager next let’s click on the best match this drops us into the hyper-v manager and we’re going to use this interface here to manage all of our virtual machines over on the left hand side you can see all of the different servers and one of them right here should look familiar that’s your computer name you can set up a virtual machine on your computer but here if we click on hyper-v manager we can also connect to another server and another server is basically just another computer that’s running virtual machines and what’s neat is that you can manage virtual machines on both your computer or even on other computers or what’s referred to here as a server today we want to create a virtual machine on our computer so over on the left hand side let’s click on your computer name now that you’ve clicked on your computer name you’ll see that the screen here updated we have a whole bunch of different screens and panels here in the center and in a moment we’ll come back to what you can do with these over on the right hand side you also see all of these different actions by far the easiest way to set up a virtual machine is to click on quick create this opens up a prompt where we can specify all of the details of our virtual machine over on the left hand side you can select the operating system that you want to install so down below i could install another instance of windows 10 or i could even put on a flavor of linux ubuntu let’s say i want to install mac os or maybe some other version of linux down below i can click on local installation source and here i can point to an iso file and that will install a different operating system now just to keep things simple i’m going to go with ubuntu when i select this over on the right hand side if i scroll down i can see how large the download size is so first i’ll have to download the file before i can install it onto my virtual machine there’s also a drop down right here with some additional options when i click into this i can give my virtual machine a name i’ll type something in i’ll give it the descriptive name test machine right down here i could also select my network switch here i’ll just go with the default now we’re all ready to set up our virtual machine next let’s click on create virtual machine this will kick off the setup process if you haven’t downloaded the os yet you’ll have to go through the download process but once you’ve done that it’ll kick off your new virtual machine we’ve now successfully created our virtual machine and i could immediately start connecting to it or i could go through and edit the settings for now i want to close this window and i’ll show you how you can access these different settings from the main interface we’re now back in the main interface and we have our new virtual machine show up right here in the list and here we’ll see that the virtual machine is currently turned off to turn it on i can click on this item and over on the right hand side i can click on start alternatively i can also right click on this item and then i can click on start why don’t we start our virtual machine now that the virtual machine has started we’ll see that it’s running it’s currently consuming some cpu and you can also see the uptime down below we also see checkpoints and you might be wondering well what is a checkpoint basically if you’re going to let’s say install an application or maybe you’re going to make some changes to your operating system you can set up a checkpoint so if you ever want to roll back to that point in time you can very easily do that now when i kicked off my test machine for the very first time it automatically created a checkpoint over on the right hand side right here i can also manually create a checkpoint whenever i want down below i can also see some of the details of my test machine now before we jump into the test machine let’s click into settings to see some of the things that we can do within settings here i can go through and i could modify different aspects of my virtual machine here i could allocate different amounts of memory i could also allocate different amounts of my processor and here if i go down i could rename my machine again so let’s say i didn’t give it a good name during the setup process i can change that back on the main screen i can also go through and i can move the vm to a different computer or i can even export it so maybe someone else can use this vm so we’ve now gone through a few of the different settings and i think it’s time to jump into our virtual machine over here on the left hand side i can see my test machine and if i double click on this image this will launch up my virtual machine so right now this is the first time i’m launching this and so i have to go through the operating system installation process now i’ve already gone through and i’ve set up a separate virtual machine where i’ve already gone through the setup process here i can click on the virtual machine and this will allow me to connect to it this opens up a completely separate machine and this has a different operating system running on it here i can launch the web browser i can navigate to different websites i can install applications and everything that happens within this virtual machine is separate from my computer so in a sense anything that happens on a virtual machine stays on the virtual machine once i’m all done using this virtual machine i can close it and once again anything that happens there is separate from my machine here in the list i can see that all of my virtual machines are currently running and they’re going to use some memory and they’re also going to use some cpu if i no longer need it running i can right click on it and i can either turn it off or i could shut it down here i’ll just turn it off and that’ll shut down this virtual machine let’s say that maybe i don’t need this virtual machine anymore i can right click on it and i can simply delete it all together and that virtual machine will be gone if i want to launch another virtual machine i could go back and i could create another one over here in the action menu alright well that’s how easy it is to set up your very own virtual machine if this video helped you please give it a thumbs up to see more videos like this in the future make sure to hit that subscribe button also if you want to see me cover any other videos on this channel leave a note down below alright well that’s all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye [Music] you