Preventing system sleep ONLY while Hyper-V VM is running

Question

Looking for a way to tell the Host Windows 11 OS to not sleep while a Hyper-V VM is running. Powercfg /requestsoverride does literally nothing. I've tried; (vmwp.exe is the VM worker and is running while the VM is, mmc.exe is the management interface for Hyper-V)

1. powercfg /requestsoverride process "C:\Windows\System32\vmwp.exe" system
2. powercfg /requestsoverride process "C:\Windows\System32\vmwp.exe" system display
3. powercfg /requestsoverride service "C:\Windows\System32\vmwp.exe" system
4. powercfg /requestsoverride service "C:\Windows\System32\vmwp.exe" system display
5. powercfg /requestsoverride driver "C:\Windows\System32\vmwp.exe" system
6. powercfg /requestsoverride driver "C:\Windows\System32\vmwp.exe" system display
7. powercfg /requestsoverride process "C:\Windows\System32\mmc.exe" system
8. powercfg /requestsoverride process "C:\Windows\System32\mmc.exe" system display
9. powercfg /requestsoverride service "C:\Windows\System32\mmc.exe" system
10. powercfg /requestsoverride service "C:\Windows\System32\mmc.exe" system display
11. powercfg /requestsoverride driver "C:\Windows\System32\mmc.exe" system
12. powercfg /requestsoverride driver "C:\Windows\System32\mmc.exe" system display

The goal is basically while the VM is running it shows up in the output of Powercfg /requests without the need for external programs, continually running scripts, or changing of power plans. I want the system to behave absolutely normal when the VM is not running.

***moved from Windows / Windows 11 / Sleep and Power on, off***

Answer 1

Hi ETHREAL1,

If you are using a laptop you could trigger presentation settings

Manual activation can be done by right-click on start then choose mobility center & turn on presentation mode, this will override power savings

This can also be activated through CLI with presentationsettings /start or /stop

you could use this PowerShell script to check & trigger it

#check if any vm is running $vm = Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.State -eq 'Running'}#start presentation mode if vm is runningif ($vm) {Write-Host "A virtual machine is currently running - turning on presentation settings."PresentationSettings.exe /start} else {Write-Host "No virtual machines are currently running - turning off presentation settings."PresentationSettings.exe /stop}

Answer 2

Hi ETHREAL1,

You can give a try to the PowerToys Awake utility. Use the --pid argument to attach the execution of Awake to a the vmwp process to keep the computer awake when vmwp is running.

PowerToys Awake utility for Windows | Microsoft Learn