[ccurrens]

There is the Windows Hypervisor Platform[1] component recently added in windows, that at least allows other VMs to share the hypervisor using a common API. IIRC, VirtualBox 6 supports it.

To me, it seems like the use of Hyper-V was probably necessary to get the tight integration they needed to make the use of WSL 2 as seamless as it is today with the lightweight containers.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/api/

[withinrafael]

Heads up, as of Windows 10 1903 (latest update), VirtualBox QEMU, and friends will fail when attempting to use WHP. It appears to be critically broken in these builds of Windows. (It's fixed upstream in 20H1 builds.)

[TheChaplain]

I tried VirtualBox with Hyper-V and it's really slooow.

VBx also have some extra goodies like the built-in DHCP-server, host-only networking and so on which Hyper-V seems to be lacking.

[mey]

Those features do exist, but you may need a certain level of Windows licensing, and get ready to crack open a Powershell terminal to configure it.