Windows 10 Hyper-V: What is “Upgrade Configuration Version…” option?

Recently I imported some old VM into my Windows 10 Hyper-V and noticed that unlike VMs I created with latest version of Hyper-V it has an extra option named “Upgrade Configuration Versions..”:

To me option name is a bit confusing (which sometimes happens in MSFT products out of best intentions in attempts to simplify their wizards and wording). I was confused by this option name as it makes me think about configurations versioning and management rather about what it really means.  To put it simply it is equivalent of what you can see in VMware Workstation as “Upgrade Virtual Hardware”/”VM hardware compatibility” (isn’t it more appropriate name? but I guess there is also differentiation needs which software vendors may have 🙂 ).

What you should know about this is in the past (prior to Windows 10) your VMs have been upgraded automatically to new configuration version, but now you have more control over this and have upgrade it manually via GUI (see screenshot above) or using Update-VMVersion cmdlet.

“Upgrade Configuration Version…” option presented in VM properties only when your VM is in offline state. Operation is almost instant and unfortunately it doesn’t give you that VMware Workstation wizard which explains available versions and why you may want to upgrade/added features. But essentially Hyper-V no longer upgrades VMs by default to allow you to move them back to older versions in case it will be necessary and upgrade is needed to enable new features for VM (see table below):

Features available/added in different VM versions. Source: Ben Armstrong’s Virtualization Blog – Upgrading your Virtual Machine version

Virtual machines created on Windows 10 use version 6.2 configurations, and the highest value for now is 8.0 (Served 2016/Windows 10 Anniversary update). You can use this table to get an idea of configuration versions in different base OS versions:

To check configuration versions of VMs on your Hyper-V host:

Get-VM * | Format-Table Name, Version

To get configuration version supported by your host use (add –Default parameter to see default one):

Get-VMHostSupportedVersion

You can read more in official MSFT documentation: Upgrade virtual machine version in Hyper-V on Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016