How to fix “Failed to open session in VirtualBox to install Windows 11 Image” ​

An error can occur in VirtualBox Manager while trying to start up a Virtual Machine. A VirtualBox Manager is software that can help you run Virtual Machines with Windows 8,10,11, and whichever operating system you may want. In this program, you could get a very annoying error which you can end up spending a lot of your productive time trying to fix it. Check out some of my previous posts on Provisioning Azure Resources using Azure Az PowerShell Cmdlet from Cloud Shell, How to build your first CI/CD Pipeline in Azure DevOps using ASP.Net Core Application, how to secure access to your Virtual Machine with Just-in-Time (JIT) VM Access, how to configure email notifications for Azure CI/CD build Pipeline on Azure DevOps Project, and how to create an App Service Plan with Continuous Deployment to deploy a .NET Application from GitHub.

This can happen to you while trying to install the most desired Windows 11 Operating System that was officially released by Microsoft on October 5, 2021  using Oracle VirtualBox Manager. 

You may have been aware of some specific requirements that your system must meet to be able to install and run Windows 11. You can review the requirements from Microsoft official documents.  So, if your system specification falls below the requirements stated by Microsoft, one of the ways you can install Windows 11 on your system is to use VirtualBox Manager or VMWare.  

When this happens, you will get an error similar to the one shown below:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Imohweb-Win11.

Call to NEMR0InitVMPart2 failed: VERR_NEM_INIT_FAILED (VERR_NEM_VM_CREATE_FAILED).

Result Code: E_FAIL (0x80004005)
Component: ConsoleWrap
Interface: IConsole {872da645-4a9b-1727-bee2-5585105b9eed}

This usually happens if you recently upgraded your VirtualBox let’s say to v6.1.28 from v6.1.26 in your 64-bit Windows 10 Pro PC.  If you are facing or you had faced this kind of error in the past, you would agree with me how annoying it can be.

These simple steps below will guide you through quickly with ways to get it fixed. You need to disable some things in your Windows OS to fix it. Follow through the steps below: 

• From Start Menu -> Windows Feature 
• Locate Hyper-V and uncheck the box beside it to disable it
• Scroll down to locate Virtual Machine Platform and check the box beside it to enable it 
• Next enable Windows Hypervisor Platform by checking the box beside it  
• Locate and disable Windows Sandbox
• Click Ok – Windows will apply the changes and prompt you to restart the system, do not restart it yet because there is still one more thing to do. 

• Launch PowerShell as an Administrator.  
• In the PowerShell window, run bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off and hit enter. 

Lastly, you can now close the PowerShell window and restart your PC. Go ahead to run the operating system image of your choice in the VirtualBox Manager. Cheers!