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Virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running


I wanted to experiment with TensorFlow, and decided to do that in a Linux VM, despite the fact that Windows Subsystem for Linux exists. In the past I used Sun’s, and then Oracle’s VirtualBox to manage virtual machines, but since my Windows install had Hyper-V, I decided to use that instead. The virtual machine configuration was easy, with disk, networking, and memory configurations non-eventful. However when I tried to start the virtual machine to setup Ubuntu from an ISO, I was greeted with the following error:

“Virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running”

A quick Internet search revealed that a lot of people have faced that problem, and most of the community board solutions did not make any sense. The hidden gem is this technet article, which included detailed steps to find if the Windows Hypervisor was running or not, and the error message if it failed to launch. In my case, the error was:

“Hyper-V launch failed; Either VMX not present or not enabled in BIOS."

The fix here is easy, and buried in another technet article. Simply reboot the machine entering BIOS setup mode, and disable VT-d and trusted execution settings. After a quick reboot, the hypervisor is happily humming along, and the setup of my Ubuntu VM is complete.
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