Issue

Cannot launch any virtual machines on a Hyper-V host server (Windows Server 2016 Standard). Following error message is displayed when trying to start a VM:

Hyper-V Manager
An error occurred while attempting to start the selected virtual machine(s).
<VM-NAME> failed to start.
Virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running.

Resolution

Running systeminfo in command prompt shows that the host is ready for Virtualisation:

However, this also means that hypervisor is not running. When hypervisor is running systeminfo should return following:

To resolve this, run following command to enable hypervisor in bcdedit:

bcdedit /set {current} hypervisorlaunchtype auto

To confirm, that hypervisor is now enabled, run bcdedit again and look for the following line:

After rebooting the server virtual machines started with no issues.

November 2018
Windows Server 2018 Standard