Installing VMware Workstation alongside Hyper-V

For the past three years I've been working for a Microsoft Partner company in Scotland and as you can imagine their primary focus was on Microsoft products and the virtualisation technology the recommended to clients as Hyper-V so the majority of my focus has been on using that.  As such I set up a lab at home running Windows Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V to help teach myself bits and bobs.

I recently changed job and although the company I now work for is a Microsoft Partner also they focus more on using VMware as the virtualisation technology so today I decided to set up a wee mini lab to help get me back up to speed with it and test a few things.

I wanted to keep my Hyper-V in tact and run the new VMware lab in parallel, so to do that I downloaded a free trial of VMware Workstation onto my home lab server (HP Microserver N40L) but ran into an issue when trying to get it to install.  I was told I had to uninstall Hyper-V first.

After a little digging I found a useful work around:

1. Open Hyper-V Manager and click on "stop service" in the right panel
2. Open an elevated command prompt and type:
   bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
3. Restart your computer

Hyper-V is now disabled and you can run VMware workstation and your lab.  When you wish to switch back to using your Hyper-V lab carry out the following: 

1. Open an elevated command prompt and type:
   bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto
2. Restart your computer

A nice little workaround if you are switching between the two types of lab.