Resolving issue: Oracle Virtual Box and Windows 10 - Call to WHvSetupPartition failed VERR_NEM_VM_CREATE_FAILED image

Resolving issue: Oracle Virtual Box and Windows 10 – Call to WHvSetupPartition failed VERR_NEM_VM_CREATE_FAILED

December 3, 2019 Virtualization and Oracle VM 10 Comments

Like so many colleagues and fellow developers around the world, the latest Windows Update also messed up my machine’s ability to successfully run Oracle Virtual Box. When running vagrant to provision a VM, I ran into messages such as:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine. Call to WHvSetupPartition failed: ERROR_SUCCESS (Last=0xc000000d/87) (VERR_NEM_VM_CREATE_FAILED).Result Code: E_FAIL (0x80004005)Component: ConsoleWrapInterface: IConsole

When I tried to open a VM in the Oracle Virtual Box GUI that used to run fine before the Windows Update (to Windows 1903), I got a similar error.

Following the instructions in the Forum Thread https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=92453 (and https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=94892) to disable absolutely everything in Windows that has any connection with Hyper-V, I was not able to solve the issue – although I guess these steps are required too – and they seem to be enough for many users:

Make sure none of these Windows Programs or Features are running:

image

Application Guard
Credential Guard
Device Guard
<any> * Guard
Containers
Hyper-V
Virtual Machine Platform
Windows Hypervisor Platform
Windows Sandbox
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)


And to disable Hyper-V from starting the following command can be used:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

A reboot of Windows 10 is necessary. And sometimes to be sure a cold reboot and even more than one.

Thanks to my colleague, André van Winssen, I learned about these steps that finally resolved my situation:

  1. go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=53337 and download the ” Device Guard and Credential Guard hardware readiness tool “
  2. unzip it.
  3. start powershell as admin in the directory that contains the unzipped archive contents.
  4. run script with parameter -disable (see image below)
    SNAGHTML8a939
  5. reboot the machine; in the boot-sequence, press F3 when prompted to really disable the Device Guard

    image
    press F3. Then press any key to continue.

    image
    Press F3. Then

    image
    Press any key. The reboot continues
  6. after Windows comes back again, I can now run and provision VMs again with Virtual Box

Edit: After update to Windows : December 10, 2019—KB4530684 (OS Builds 18362.535 and 18363.535), my VirtualBox again would not start. Again, my colleague André van Winssen figured out the solution: (basically reiterating through this article):

  1. ensure all Windows Features are turned off that bear any relationship to hypervisor
  2. run the DG_Readiness_Tool_v3.6.ps1 tool in PowerShell as admin
  3. reboot and confirm disabling Virtualization Based Security Opt Out Tool and Credential Guard Opt Out tool

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About The Author

Lucas Jellema

Lucas Jellema, active in IT (and with Oracle) since 1994. Oracle ACE Director and Oracle Developer Champion. Solution architect and developer on diverse areas including SQL, JavaScript, Kubernetes & Docker, Machine Learning, Java, SOA and microservices, events in various shapes and forms and many other things. Author of the Oracle Press book Oracle SOA Suite 12c Handbook. Frequent presenter on user groups and community events and conferences such as JavaOne, Oracle Code, CodeOne, NLJUG JFall and Oracle OpenWorld.

10 Comments

  1. Srini March 26, 2021

    tons of thanks to you!

  2. Michael November 25, 2020

    I get the same error message when I am running out of memory. In my case I stopped the VM and 30 minutes later wanted to start it which resulted in the same error message (Power up failed (vrc=VERR_NEM_VM_CREATE_FAILED, rc=E_FAIL (0X80004005)))
    After several tries (and knowing that hyper-v was not change in the meantime) I killed Firefox after noticing it was consuming 4 GB of RAM) and afterwards I was able to start the VM again.
    So this seems to be a quite general error message for ressources not being available to VirtualBox which can be caused by a number of reasons.
    Thanks still for the article because I think it is a good summary of what you need to do to use VirtualBox under Windows 10 considering Hyper-V.

  3. Timothy Townsend October 13, 2020

    Well done and thank you. A huge time saver. The suffering was over in less than an hour

  4. Pedro Lucas August 7, 2020

    Copy-Item : Não é possível localizar a unidade. Não existe uma unidade com o nome ‘V’.
    No C:\Users\Intel\Downloads\dgreadiness_v3.6\DG_Readiness_Tool_v3.6.ps1:1246 caractere:22
    + … CmdOutput = Copy-Item “$env:windir\System32\SecConfig.efi” $FreeDrive …
    + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (V:String) [Copy-Item], DriveNotFoundException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : DriveNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.CopyItemCommand

    Lucas, I have this problem, do you know how i can fix this?
    ps: the first two sentences are in Portuguese, I’m from Brazil hahahaha.
    ps.2: the translation is “The drive cannot be located. There is no unit with the name ‘V’.”

  5. Marcia Almeida June 4, 2020

    You have no idea how grateful I am. Thank you, thank you very, very much!

    • Lucas Jellema June 4, 2020

      HI Marcia,
      You are very welcome. Thanks for letting us know!
      Lucas

  6. inga Hunt May 2, 2020

    thank you so much!

  7. Eugenio January 29, 2020

    Thanks, it took me long time to find a solution for this.

  8. Lily December 16, 2019

    Extremely grateful!

  9. Ross December 13, 2019

    Thank you!!