To set up minikube on Windows requires a hypervisor, either VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org) or Hyper-V, because, again, minikube uses the Linux VM on Windows. This means that you cannot use the Windows virtual machine (for example, running the Windows VM on macOS by parallels).

However, kubectl , the Kubernetes CLI, supports a Windows native binary that can connect to Kubernetes over a network. So, you can set up a portable suite of Kubernetes stacks on your Windows machine.

The following diagram shows the relationship between kubectl, Hypervisor, minikube, and Windows:

Hyper-V is required for Windows 8 Pro or later. While many users still use Windows 7, we will use VirtualBox as the minikube hypervisor in this recipe.