To get back to hardware virtualization mode, make sure that the following features are turned off:Īnd that the hypervisorlaunchtype is set to off in the Windows Boot Configuration Data (BCD) store. Another reason could be the Hyper-V features to be turned on.

When running in software mode, the reason is most probably an active WSL setup, which relies on the Hyper-V architecture. The hardware virtualization mode would be displayed with this blue symbol. If you see this green turtle symbol in the guest window's status bar, VirtualBox is running in software virtualization mode (which is really slow!). Do a fresh and clean install of WSL via the command line wsl -install.Uninstall and remove WSL completely from your system (backup your files if needed!).To repair the WSL installation, you can do the following: Especially when WSL was installed via one of the old methods (not via the wsl -install command line). If you already had WSL installed and made changes to Windows features, WSL might have stopped working all together. To manually add those virtualization features follow this tutorial. If you are running Windows Home, some features might not be installed on your machine. Enter OptionalFeatures.exe into a CMD or PowerShell terminal.Open Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows Features on or off, or.You can find and edit the Windows features via: In other words: WSL uses the Hyper-V architecture but not the Hyper-V feature (thanks Enable/Disable Windows Features WSL uses the Hyper-V architecture underneath but the actual Hyper-V features doesn't need to be enabled. Installing WSL via the command line should automatically turn on the following Windows features: Troubleshooting Necessary Windows Features? WSL2 - simply run the command wsl -install in an elevated PowerShell or CMD ( official docs).Virtual Box - install the newest version on your machine ( official download).To setup both systems, make sure that the virtualization options are enabled in your BIOS! It's possible to have VirtualBox and WSL2 running at the same time on Windows 10 as well as on Windows 11! Please note that when running both in parallel, VirtualBox is then only capable of running in its slower software virtualization mode. VirtualBox + WSL2 (on Windows 10 & 11) 🎉

Virtual vm box