Removing Hyper-V from Windows 10

Hyper-V is pretty cool, and I enjoyed playing with it, especially in conjunction with Ubuntu’s Multipasstool. However, once I finished playing with it – I have an Ubuntu VM in $WORK data centre that has much faster bandwidth than my home – it proved to be a pain to fully remove Hyper-V.

Why would you want to remove Hyper-V if you’re not using it? Doesn’t it just sit in the background and not do anything? Well, yes, but it also adds a virtual switch network interface to your network stack, which is confusing to things like VPNs and adds more WMI entries that slows down corporate auditing software regularly running full system checks. It’s just OS clutter, and makes things slower and more complex.

Removing the Hyper-V Windows feature from the control panel didn’t, at least for me, also remove the network additions. There was still underlying network goop remaining. This might be because I installed Hyper-V initially via the Multipass install, and it did most of the dependency installs via command line.

Anyway, long story short, here’s how to remove all the Hyper-V stuff.

• Start PowerShell as Administrator
• Run this command:
  Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V-All
• Your computer will need to reboot, probably twice

That’s it! H/T to this Spiceworks forum post.