Virtual Machines on Surface Book

Question

Has anyone succeeded in installing and running virtual machines on the Surface Book? If so, was it with VMware, VirtualBox, Hyper V or something else?

Answer 1

Yes - I have the i7, dGPU, 512 GB SSD model and it runs virtual machines great with Hyper-V. 

Did you have a more specific question?

Answer 2

Thanks for your answer. I was wondering about how the Hyper-V on the Surface Book handles the switch between the onboard graphics processor and discrete GPU when moving between the display attached and detached in the virtual environment. Have you tried separating  and reattaching the display while running a VM?

Answer 3

I don't have a Surface Book, but do have a Surface Pro 4 i7, 16GB and 512GB SSD. I've ran VMs on Hyper-V but found it not to be as functional as I needed it to be (I needed to connect USB devices to the VM) so I switched to VMWare Workstation Player 12 and it works well.

Because it abstracts the physical graphics card from the VM it should allow you to transition GPUs without affecting the VM and when on the NVidia you should be able to use the hardware acceleration offered by that card.

One thing to beware with VMWare though is that when it installs it creates two virtual ethernet adapters for direct access to network. I noticed in sleep studies of my machine that those NICs were interfering with connected standby and staying active for over 90% of the time so I removed them and now use NAT only for the VMs.

Answer 4

I don’t do it often but in my experience Hyper-V handles the host going to sleep and the tablet detaching from the base just fine.   (fine in that everything continues running, no crashes, no issues, etc)  I use the Hyper-V enhanced session mode which gives the same experience as RDP’ing to a remote machine.  

I just tried it again to confirm.  With a VM running and enhanced (RDP) session connected, I detached the tablet from the base and it just went into tablet mode (i.e. full screen, larger touch friendly menus in the host OS, etc) and continued running as if nothing happened.  Without a keyboard and mouse attached I had to use the pen to manipulate menus in a VM (maybe with more experimentation I could probably put the VM into tablet mode as well) but with touch and a pen I manipulated the VM and launched Visual Studio in the VM and then built a project I am working on.  I then reattached and again, everything continued running well as if nothing happened except a change between laptop and tablet mode had occurred.  I closed visual studio and shut down the VM.

I don’t have any VMs ready that I am certain require the dGPU or know for certain if the RDP session would properly utilize it anyway.  (I don’t use the RemoteFX features of Hyper-V.)  So, I’m not sure how to properly test the dGPU conerns you mention but for the common VM use case I think there are no issues at all. 

I used to be an avid VMware Workstation user of versions 5-10 and licensed owner of versions 5-12 (I purchased 11 and 12 but couldn’t bring myself to use them after experiencing the performance of Hyper-V). 

Paulo – what kind of USB device?  I too found this to be a little lacking compared to VMware workstation but depending on the type of device there are reasonable work arounds.  For example,

·       if you always use the enhanced session mode and/or RDP to the VM (which you should just to get the better full screen experience anyway), you can use many USB devices like iPods, Phones, smartcards etc.  They just pass-thru the RDP session.  (sometimes it requires drivers to be installed on both the host and the VM though) 

·       For external hard drives, it’s a little less reasonable because you have to use the host’s disk manager utility to set the disk offline in the host first.  I think that’s a pain but doing that will enable you to attach the external USB disk to the VM in the Hyper-V settings.  (the VM just sees it like any internal-like hard disk and doesn’t know it’s an external drive). 

·       And then there is a whole class of less common USB devices where you can try a USB over IP solution that may or may not work. 

Mark

Answer 5

Yeah, in my case was a smartcard reader that a client required me to use to get access to some of their systems. I do not want to install the drivers on the host OS because I'm OCD and overprotective of it like that so I wanted a pass-through that would allow me to install the drivers only on the guest. Unfortunately for the RDP pass-through you mention to work the device has to be installed and configured in the host and I wasn't happy with that.

Performance-wise I can't say that I have noticed much difference between a machine running on Hyper-V or on VMWare Workstation Player 12. Both perform well and I do quite a bit of heavy work on my Linux desktop in a VM so yeah, not bad.