Windows 8 is stuffed with lots of goodies (that’s the geeky-me speaking). Hyper-V in Windows 8 (client OS) is – amongst many others – one of the features I’ve been eagerly awaiting. Why? Well, as an IT-pro I regularly need to do some testing while not being able to connect to my home lab (which is running a Hyper-V server). Because in my day-to-day job I’m running Windows 7 on my laptop, and I don’t want to reboot into Windows Server 2008 all the time, I have to revert to other solutions if I want to make a VM easily accessible while continuing to work.
To achieve that, I use VMware workstation. With the new Hyper-V feature in Windows 8 however, I can now do this from within my client OS, using my preferred hypervisor 
Hyper-V is not enabled by default so you will have to manually add/enable it. The easiest way to do this is as follows:
1. Go to the bottom-right corner of your screen. A shortcut bar will appear, allowing you to open the control panel (“Settings > Control Panel”). Alternatively you could go through the “start-menu” (metro-style) if you want.
2. From the Control Panel, open “Programs”
3. Now click “Turn Windows features on or off”
4. Click Hyper-V and confirm. After the installation, you will have to reboot the system.
5. After the reboot, Hyper-V manager will be available, offering you the same – familiar – interface as in Server 8.
Good luck with it!
EDIT:
I almost forget the most important part. For the geeks amongst us: you can also use PowerShell of course:
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature –FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V (-Restart)
(add the restart only if you want to restart your computer automatically)
After I activated Hyper-v, system just hangs at restart. Just spins and spins.
That’s odd. I re-tried on another computer, just to make sure, but did not encounter any issues with it…
Have you been able to recover from this issue in the meanwhile?
I retried again and again on my machine , it is still facing the same stuck on restart, problem. I have tried this time with the developer preview and turned on Hyper-v it is fine. So, there is an issue in the Consumer preview and my machine.
I tried enabling Hyper-V on my Dell Precision T3500, but Hyper-V is not listed in the “Turn Windows features on or off” -list in Win 8. I have enabled virtualization in BIOS, and the CPU (Xeon W3520)should support it. Why does Hyper-V not appear in the feature list?
Hi there,
just a quick question. Running Hyper-V in Windows 8 requires your CPU to support SLAT. Can you confirm that this is the case?
Michael