Installing Windows 10/11 in Hyper-V 2nd Generation

[German]Installing Windows 10 or Windows 11 in virtual environments can present some challenges. Depending on the hypervisor, the installation may even fail completely. Blog reader Thomas S. emailed me back in December 2021 with his experiences installing Windows 10 as well as Windows 11 under Microsoft's Hyper-V 2nd generation. I publsih his information here in the blog – maybe other readers can benefit from it.

I had already pointed out in 2019 in the blog post Hyper-V 2nd Gen: Can't install an operating system that the installation of a guest operating system can end with an error message 'PXE Network boot using IPv4 …'. Now Thomas has looked into the issue and wrote:

Today I would like to address you directly for the first time, because I came across m.E. very interesting information on the topic "Installation of Windows 10/11 in Hyper-V 2nd Generation", which is certainly too extensive to write directly as an answer in a post. I would like to leave it then to your judgement whether you use this information further. The starting point of my description of the problem is this post from 2019 [Note: The above blog post]. 

I was already affected by this Gen 1/2 problem about 3 years ago, when I had newly purchased my current notebook with Win10 Pro and got the idea to install another Win10 in Hyper-V for testing after all. I still had one license left, which I could use for this.

At that time I was not able to install this Win10 in the VM as Gen2, but since the device and Hyper-V were new to me, I did not dabble any further, but installed the Win10 as Gen1. I had not found your above post at the time either. But that was so far ok and was quite sufficient for my purposes.

I was then only once a bit surprised when I found that I could install a Linux as Gen2 without any problems. But now I wanted to make a Win11 out of the Win10 in Hyper-V and for that I had to solve this Gen2 problem.

Thomas then tried the tips described in the blog post above and other places I found, but none of it worked. It always came this error message that the boot process did not work. Triggered by the hint in the above blog that one should set the keyboard in the Hyper-V settings as "Use for physical computer" (which was also not the solution), Thomas then found the solution:

The moment the boot process starts and "Press any key…" appears, you press the first icon in the toolbar of the VM window in the upper left corner, which sends a <Ctrl>-<Alt><Del> to the VM.

Then you press "any key", e.g. press the space bar and hold it, then the virtual DVD (ISO file) boots and the installation process starts!

After Thomas found this, he then added the hint in this YouTube video to the web page Solving the "Boot Failed. EFI SCSI Device" error when installing Windows 2012 Server on Hyper-V. There it is described that you should hold down the space bar before starting the VM (and then for quite a while). Thomas writes: 

And indeed, that's how it works. So with these two tricks you can do Windows 10/11 Gen2 installations in Hyper-V.

In my opinion, this is a rather unpleasant thing that these tricks are needed, I really can't understand the Microsoft company, because especially with the release of Windows 11, the need to perform Windows installations in Hyper-V with Gen2 has surely increased once again.

At this point, I like to thanks the reader for sharing his experience. In the meantime, I've come to the conclusion, that the frequent updates of Windows 10 and Windows 11 are continuously causing virtualization issues. Developers of hypervisors are forced to patch behind the Windows 10/11 developers' "optimizations" to be able to virtualize guests. It's a mess.