14 DAY TRIAL // One of the new features that may come to Windows 10 Redstone 6, and which wasn’t announced yet because it’s still in development, could be support for virtual machines without the need for Hyper-V.
Tero Alhonen discovered evidence of a new Virtual Machines entry in the Windows Features dialog which users can turn to in order to enable or disable features in the operating system.
Specifics are missing for the time being, but it turns out that his option becomes available for Skip Ahead insiders who install the most recent Redstone 6 builds. Once enabled, it does download some files, but by the looks of things, it can’t be launched just yet, most likely as Microsoft is still working on it.
Without any specifics, we can only guess what’s the purpose of this new Virtual Machines entry in Windows 10 Redstone 6.
There’s a chance that Microsoft enables support for virtual machines in Windows 10 without the need for Hyper-V, which would definitely be a welcome improvement for everyone working with VMs.
Redstone 6 coming in spring 2019
At the same time, another more unlikely guess is that Microsoft is renaming Hyper-V to Virtual Machines for an approach that makes more sense natively, and at the same time supporting an expansion to all Windows 10 SKUs.
Unsurprisingly, Hyper-V support on all Windows 10 versions is one highly-requested feature, and a post on UserVoice does call for Microsoft to make this possible in the operating system. The request, however, was posted in November 2016, so it’s probably better later than never if this option is indeed implemented.
Windows 10 Redstone 6 is expected to launch in the spring of 2019, so there’s still plenty of time to learn more about the changes that Microsoft is planning in the OS. New builds could bring more evidence of what the company is aiming for with virtual machines, so expect further specifics to be available soon.