Yes, your Win8.1 would be running as a VM. However, for the most part you won't even notice.

This article has a pretty good explanation, in the examples given the parent...

If you have the Hyper-V Platform role installed then your 'host' OS is indeed running inside a hypervisor - everything is as Hyper-V is a Type 1 Hypervisor.

At the command...

peter.row (7/14/2014)

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My only thought is that it is because I have the HyperV client installed on my machine which enables me to run VMs from our central VM server locally...

This will probably depend on the type of Hypervisor being used, from Wikipedia:

Type 1...

Toreador (7/2/2013)

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On my screen, approximately 2/3 of the width is white. Why all the wasted space? I don't do my development on a mobile device, and don't read this website...