Hyper-V is a
Type 1 (bare-metal) hypervisor that comes with Windows Pro and higher editions (though it can be installed on Home if you look up how). Being Type 1 means Hyper-V runs directly on the hardware, with a lightweight virtualization layer in between. This allows near-native performance.
In contrast, Oracle VirtualBox is a
Type 2 (hosted) hypervisor by default—it runs as a regular application on top of Windows. As a result, all VM hardware access must go through the Windows OS first, which adds overhead and reduces performance compared to Type 1 hypervisors.
So, in general,
Hyper-V is faster than VirtualBox by default.
However, there’s a neat trick: if you have both Hyper-V and VirtualBox installed,
you can configure VirtualBox to use Hyper-V as its backend. To do this:
- Open the settings for your VirtualBox VM,
- Go to System > Acceleration,
- Set Paravirtualization Interface to Hyper-V.
This allows VirtualBox to leverage Hyper-V’s performance benefits while maintaining VirtualBox’s compatibility and features.
Why is this useful? In cybersecurity, many pre-built VM targets and OS images are packaged specifically for VirtualBox. So for students taking a cybersecurity course, it makes sense to use VirtualBox—but enabling Hyper-V paravirtualization gives the best of both worlds: broad compatibility and improved performance.
If you're not teaching a cybersecurity course, however, it makes sense to have a simpler setup where you just stick with Hyper-V for faster, cleaner VM performance on Windows.