Quick Fix: Virtual Machine Could Not Be Started Because The Hypervisor Is Not Running

I got smacked with this error message today which says the virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running as seen below:

I double checked Intel-VTx and DEP was enabled in the BIOS and then discovered there were no event logs under Application and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Hyper-V-Hypervisor in the Event Viewer. I would’ve thought an event or two should be logged since I enabled the hyper-v feature and also created a virtual machine.

Fortunately there’s a short one-liner I ran in an elevated command prompt to set the hypervisor to launch upon boot up:

bcdedit /set HypervisorLaunchType auto

You’d think the hypervisor would be set to launch automatically after having enabled the feature in the first place, right?

My experience with Hyper-V up to now has been on the server side with the fully fledged hypervisor on Windows Server 2012 R2. So I decided to make use of client hyper-v on my Windows 10 computer for building reference images when I hit this snag