Why Hyper-V run Windows 10 VM as remote computer?

Question

I downloaded Windows 10 free Virtual Machine from https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/, extracted the VHDX file and ran it Hyper-V in my host OS Windows 10 X64 Pro. I also enable the Guest Services in Hyper-V settings to copy-paste files between host & guest.

But when I shut down the guest OS it shows a warning: "If you shut down this remote computer, no one can use it until someone at the remote location manually restarts it".

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Update:: After enabling Enhanced Session Mode in Hyper-V settings, I ran query session command. If I do not enable that mode then remote clipboard does not work. When I disabled it the user changes to console session name.

• With Enhanced Session Mode enabled::

• With Enhanced Session Mode disabled::

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Question: Why does Hyper-V run VM as remote machine? And why does this warning popup when I try to shut down the VM? Why disabling enhanced session mode makes session to console mode?

Answer 1

The prompt "If you shut down this remote computer..." is a result of how you connect to the computer, not what type of computer it is (i.e. virtual or physical).

This prompt is displayed when shutting down a computer from a session other than the target computer's console session. This would include Remote Desktop connections, which are identified as rdp sessions when running the query session command.

In your case, if you run query session when connected to your virtual machine I suspect you will not find yourself in the console session. This would explain why you get warned that you might not have physical access to the machine you're shutting down, hence the warning message you receive before shut down.

A console session represents the computer's physical interface. This is easy to identify with a physical machine; it's the keyboard/monitor/mouse. But VMs have a "physical" interface too. How you access it depends on the virtualization software, but they all have them.