Installing Kali in Hyper-V for the first time (Win11)

This is a brief manual of my Hyper-V setup written for other hackers who were using VirtualBox/VMware their whole career like me and are not much interested in preparing advanced settings. Generally, using Hyper-V for the first time is eye opening. The experience is much different but, after a while, everything becomes intuitive.

I'm using Windows 11 Pro and Kali VM. 

Enable Hyper-V virtualization

Hyper-V can't be downloaded from the Internet, it must be enabled on your PC. It will download itself automatically. Follow Microsoft instruction: Step-By-Step: Enabling Hyper-V for Use on Windows 11

Recap:

Win+R -> appwiz.cpl -> Turn Windows features on or off -> Hyper-V -> OK -> restart

First look

Left-hand panel displays available physical servers - in this case "ROSEMARY" is just a name of my PC. Your PC will be the only option unless you want to connect to remote servers.

Virtual Machines panel contains a list of your VMs, and if you click one, the panel below will display a list of checkpoints saved for this VM. Note - by default Hyper-V manager has auto-checkpoints enabled, which are being done when you turn off your machine. You may want to disable this feature to save disk space (for every VM separately!).

Right click on VM -> settings -> Checkpoints -> uncheck Use automatic checkpoints.

Quick Create option contains a list of available VMs, if you choose one, manager starts to download it from the Internet and once it's done, the machine is ready to use.

 

This is very convenient when you need to load Win11 dev machine for Windows testing and tools.

Download and Start Kali

I use pre-build VMs:

1. Get Kali 
2. Import instruction

In my case the install-vm.bat file returned some errors, but the VM was correctly loaded anyway.

Boot Kali by clicking "Start" on the right-hand panel. It starts in the background and you can't see it until you click "Connect". It connects with the VM via RDP. This is the biggest difference between Hyper-V manager and other virtualization solutions.

My thoughts about Hyper-V at this point:

• less resources and power used in case you just run scans in the background
• it uses typical Microsoft solutions (for example RDP) so it's nothing new
• easy access to checkpoints
• better compatibility overall with Windows OS  = less troubleshooting

Enabling copy and paste

There are no typical guest tools that must be installed once and then everything works forever. 

Hyper-V manager has a functionality called "Enhanced session mode", which, among other things, enables copy-and-paste between the host and VMs. It can be set in the connection panel or in View > Enhanced session.

Thanks for reading!