Hyper-V is a native hypervisor developed by Microsoft; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows.

[2] A server computer running Hyper-V can be configured to expose individual virtual machines to one or more networks.

[9] Hyper-V Server 2008 is limited to a command-line interface used to configure the host OS, physical hardware, and software.

A menu driven CLI interface and some freely downloadable script files simplify configuration.

Remote access to Hyper-V Server requires CLI configuration of network interfaces and Windows Firewall.

A partition is a logical unit of isolation, supported by the hypervisor, in which each guest operating system executes.

Enlightened I/O is a specialized virtualization-aware implementation of high level communication protocols, like SCSI, that allows bypassing any device emulation layer and takes advantage of VMBus directly.

Guest operating systems with Enlightened I/O and a hypervisor-aware kernel such as Windows Server 2008 and later server versions, Windows Vista SP1 and later clients and offerings from Citrix XenServer and Novell will be able to use the host resources better since VSC drivers in these guests communicate with the VSPs directly over VMBus.

On July 20, 2009, Microsoft submitted Hyper-V drivers for inclusion in the Linux kernel under the terms of the GPL.

[32] Microsoft was required to submit the code when it was discovered that they had incorporated a Hyper-V network driver with GPL-licensed components statically linked to closed-source binaries.

[33] Kernels beginning with 2.6.32 may include inbuilt Hyper-V paravirtualization support which improves the performance of virtual Linux guest systems in a Windows host environment.

Paravirtualization support requires installing the Linux Integration Components or Satori InputVSC drivers.

[41] Officially Hyper-V does not support the host/root operating system's optical drives to pass-through in guest VMs.

As a result, burning to discs, audio CDs, video CD/DVD-Video playback are not supported; however, a workaround exists using the iSCSI protocol.

Since Hyper-V is a native hypervisor, as long as it is installed, third-party software cannot use VT-x or AMD-V. For instance, the Intel HAXM Android device emulator (used by Android Studio or Microsoft Visual Studio) cannot run while Hyper-V is installed.