Hyper-V and Power Management

When you enable the Hyper-V role on Windows Server 2008 support for sleep / hibernate will be disabled.  The reason for this is that supporting these features on a hypervisor based system is incredibly complicated - and Hyper-V is designed to run on servers - where sleep and hibernate are not used.

To answer some common questions:

  1. What about other aspects of power management?

    Other power management methods (changing processor speed, entering low power states, etc...) are still functional with Hyper-V is enabled.

  2. Is there some way that I can "hack" the system to re-enable sleep / hibernate with Hyper-V?

    No.

  3. But I want to run Hyper-V on my laptop!

    Good for you.  I run Hyper-V on a tablet myself (with 320GB 7200 RPM disks and 4GB ram).  But you will either need to live without sleep / hibernate - or dual boot your system (I actually triple boot my tablet).

Cheers,
Ben