Injecting network drivers into a Hyper-V Server (or Windows Server) installation

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about running Windows from a flash drive – specifically running Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. One thing I hadn’t got around to at that time though was injecting the necessary drivers to provide network access to/from the server – which is pretty critical for a virtualisation host! Under network settings, the Hyper-V Server Configuration (sconfig.vbs) showed that there were no active network adapters found but I knew this should be pretty easy to fix.

One of the strengths of the Hyper-V architecture is that it uses the standard Windows device driver model. This is in stark contrast to the monolithic model used for VMware ESX (and ESXi) and is the reason that I can’t do something similar with ESXi. In fact, adding network drivers to Hyper-V Server (or for that matter Windows Server 2008 running in server core mode, or even for command line administration of a full Windows Server 2008 installation) is pretty straightforward.

The network card I needed to support is a Marvell Yukon 88E8055 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller and, even though Windows 7 recognised the hardware and installed the appropriate drivers at installation time, I couldn’t find the drivers in the install.wim file on the DVD. That was no problem – Marvell’s download site had x64 drivers for Windows 7 available and these are also be suitable for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Armed with the appropriate driver (yk62x64.sys v11.10.7.3), I ran pnputil -i -a yk62x64.inf on my Hyper-V Server:

Microsoft PnP Utility

Processing inf :            yk62x64.inf
Successfully installed the driver on a device on the system.
Driver package added successfully.
Published name :            oem0.inf

Total attempted:              1
Number successfully imported: 1

(oem0.inf and an associated oem0.pnf file were created in the %windir%\inf\ folder)

With drivers loaded, I restarted the server (probably not necessary but I wanted to ensure that all services were running) and Hyper-V Server recognised the network card, allowing me to make configuration changes if required.

To validate the configuration, I ran pnputil -e, to which the response was:

Microsoft PnP Utility

Published name :            oem0.inf
Driver package provider :   Marvell
Class :                     Network adapters
Driver date and version :   07/20/2009 11.10.7.3
Signer name :               Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher

So, that’s installing network drivers on Hyper-V Server, what about removing them? Here, I was less successful. I tried removing the plug and play package with pnputil -f -d oem0.inf and this removed the package from %windir%\inf but, after a reboot, my network settings persisted. I also used devcon.exe, the command line equivalent to the Windows Device Manager (making sure I had the amd86 version, not i386 or ia64) to successfully remove the PnP package (devcon -f dp_delete oem0.inf) as well as the network interface (devcon remove "PCI\VEN_11AB&DEV_4363") but this still left several copies of yk62x64.sys available in various Windows system folders. Again, after a reboot the network card was re-enabled. Uninstalling network drivers is not a very likely scenario in most cases but, with a bootable flash device potentially roaming between hardware platforms, it would be good to work out how to do this. Of course, my work is based on the release candidate – the RTM version of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is yet to be released to web.

(Failing to) run VMware ESXi on a notebook computer

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

In an attempt to re-acquaint myself with some of the VMware product set (it’s now over 3 and a half years since I studied for my VMware Certified Professional accreditation and I’ve hardly touched a VMware product since), I decided to have a play with VMware ESXi.

In fact, one of my colleagues wants to have a system whereby his colleagues, who get supplied with images from EMC in VMware format and Microsoft in VHD format, can dual-boot between hypervisors. I couldn’t see why that wouldn’t work (I suggested just using VMware Server and Virtual Server on the same box but he was worried about future-proofing the solution), so I set about trying to dual-boot Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and VMware ESXi on the same machine.

First up, I downloaded ESXi 4.0 and started to run the installer, which detected my hardware but then returned:

Failed to load
Failed to load lvmdriver

It turns out that ESXi 4.0 requires that a compatible network card is available before it will install and, not surprisingly, the Marvell Yukon 88E8055 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller in my notebook PC is not the kind of server-class hardware that ESX is designed for!

So I gave up on ESXi 4.0 and tried ESXi 3.5. This installed pretty quickly but, of course the network card was still unsupported and my IP address was 0.0.0.0 (no way of managing the box!).

As this is a notebook computer, I can’t upgrade the network card (unless I use a USB-connected NIC) but my plea for help on the VMware forums didn’t turn up anything useful. It seems I can run VMware ESX in VMware Workstation or I can run VMware Player from a USB drive. The long and the short of it is that, if VMware don’t provide driver support in ESX/ESXi, you are stuffed. No great surprises there but it’s really frustrating not to be able to get something working!

Windows Virtual PC and XP Mode release candidates

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this evening, Microsoft announced that the release candidate for WIndows XP Mode (Virtual PC 7) is now available. It’s good timing really. In the next couple of days I should be able to download the RTM bits for Windows 7 and, as upgrading from the XP Mode beta is not supported, it means I should have the new version of WIndows XP Mode before I rebuild my workstation onto an RTM build.

There have been a few changes in Windows XP Mode between beta and RC:

  • USB devices can now be attached to Windows XP Mode applications directly from the Windows 7 superbar, making them available to applications running in Windows XP Mode without the need to go into full screen mode.
  • Windows XP Mode applications can now be accessed with a jump-list allowing a right-click on the Windows XP Mode applications from the superbar to select and open most recently used files.
  • It is possible to customise where Windows XP Mode differencing disk files are stored.
  • Differencing disks may be compacted.
  • There is a new option to turn off and discard changes when using Undo disks.
  • Drive sharing between Windows XP Mode and Windows 7 can be disabled.
  • Initial setup includes a new user tutorial about how to use Windows XP Mode.
  • Faster setup.
  • The ability to install Windows XP components without access to media.

Interestingly, Microsoft is now saying you need an additonal 1GB of RAM for XP Mode (2GB recommended). Of course, you don’t need 1GB of RAM in order to run a copy of Windows XP and a virtual machine manager but that tells you what you might want for any level of performance. In addition to the requirement for hardware that offers virtualisation assistance, this is just one more reason why XP Mode is not a solution for clients looking to sweat their existing hardware assets a while longer… this is purely a software sticking plaster for legacy applications. On the other hand, it’s working pretty well for me with Outlook 2007 in a VM to support Google Calendar Sync and Outlook 2010 on my workstation as my client of choice.

A couple more notes worth mentioning…

Learn about managing AD using PowerShell and AGPM with the Active Directory UK user group

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Mark Parris is organising another meeting of the Active Directory UK User Group for 16 September 2009 and this time the topics will be:

  • An introduction to PowerShell, demo-heavy and presented by Richard Siddaway. In this session Richard will looking specifically at the new AD provider and cmdlets in PowerShell v2, which is included in Windows Server 2008 R2.
  • Managing GPOs with Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) 3.0, where Jane Lewis will present AGPM (part of MDOP), investigating and discussing some of its key features and looking at how it can help customers manage, control and secure Group Policy.‬‪

Registration is required.

Hackintosh netbook revisited

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Hackintosh Finder Icon by ~3ncA few months ago, I wrote about the installation of Mac OS X on my Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbook. Whilst I was pleased to have a working installation of OS X there were still a few things that didn’t quite work as I’d have likef. This post details a few more tweaks I’ve made to the Hackintosh.

My S10e is a Hackintosh, rather than a Macintosh, so I replaced the standard Mac OS X Finder icon with the Hackintosh Finder Icon by ~3nc using LiteIcon.

I thought that the fans weren’t running as often as they had been under Windows… in fact I’m not even sure they were running at all. Furthermore, iStatMenus would only tell me the hard disk temperature so I wasn’t sure how warm the CPU was running, or how fasts the fans were turning. Thankfully, before I fried my netbook, a comment on this blog pointed me back to The Kitch and ultimately to a post on the Lenovo IdeaPad S Series Forums which linked to an updated version of AppleACPIPlatform.kext, which I then installed using Kext Helper. After a reboot, my fans have been running to keep the netbook cool(er), although it’s still pretty hot and I seem to have lost Bluetooth.

I had a play with a few options to scale the screen resolution; however the results were not really fantastic. I did eventually settle on using defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.96 to make the screen appear to be 600 pixels deep but some of the icons (e.g. the battery on the menu bar) were screwed up.

I also have a UK keyboard, so I followed Liquid State’s advice, using Ukelele‘s LogitechU.K.Intl.keylayout (copied to /Library/Keyboard Layouts and selected in the International system preferences) and then adjusting the modifier keys as described by Phil Gyford (alternatively, I could have swapped the Windows key and the alt key to keep them the same way around as on a Mac keyboard). Incidentally, Apple keyboards still have the ” and @ reversed (even with a UK layout) but at least with this configuration the labels on the keys matched the resulting output.

The biggest letdown was Ethernet connectivity. There was a project working on porting the Broadcom BCM57xx and 59xx Linux drivers to OS X but nothing is happening fast and it really seems to be one guy working with limited spare time and limited collaboration. Wireless is fine but wired Ethernet is more reliable (and often the only option in a hotel room) so this was probably the final nail in my Hackintosh’s coffin.

Now the S10 has been replaced by the S10-2 and Gizmodo reports that it’s not really suitable for hackintosh conversion. My Hackintosh was a fun experiment but ultimately I’m not finding it as useful as I would if it was running Windows. It’s not that there is anything wrong with Mac OS X but I use Macs for my digital media work and a netbook is not really the right computing platform for that. In addition, I’m missing out on things like reliable Bluetooth, sleep, and Ethernet connectivity – all of which I could get in a Mac… if I was prepared to pay the money. Let’s see if the Apple iPod tablet really does make it to market this winter.

In a few hours, I’ll take a final disk image of the Hackintosh for posterity and rebuild it to run the final release of Windows 7 (thanks to Microsoft for my complementary copy) – which is, after all, what I originally bought it for!

Yet more confusion on Windows 7 E Edition

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Various portions of the IT press are reporting that Windows 7 E Edition has been killed off. I sincerely hope so – it’s always been a daft idea created to satisfy bureaucrats in Brussels and the creators or a certain minority web browser that appears to be fighting a battle in the courts after its business model has failed – but I’m yet to be convinced that E Edition is completely dead.

On Friday, Microsoft issued an announcement about the inclusion of a browser selection ballot screen for European Windows users (note that this affects XP, Vista as well as 7). There are still some unanswered questions though:

  • How will it be determined that this is a European installation of Windows? IP address (unreliable)? Product SKU (in which case E Edition is still required)? Regional settings?
  • Will this just apply to EU member states? What about the rest of the EMEA region (Microsoft views Europe as EMEA – not just the EU) or even European countries that are not members of the EU (e.g. Switzerland)?
  • Will this even satisfy the regulators? The EU Competition Commission has not fully approved Microsoft’s proposal and Opera (who brought the case to the courts) are reported to be unhappy about the use of icons to represent browsers. Apparently Internet Explorer’s E icon is synonymous with the Internet for many users (does that make it iconic!) and Opera would prefer an alternative solution (well, Opera comes after Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox whether you base the order on the alphabet or on market share… so I don’t know what would please them – a random selection of browsers perhaps? Please no!)

The dominance of Internet Explorer does not seem to have hurt Mozilla, Apple, or Google in gaining market share with their web browsers but it seems Opera still wants more – they want Microsoft to apply the same solution on a global basis (as well as Apple and Ubuntu!).

Maybe Microsoft will offer further concessions to the courts – I can’t help thinking that they have other things to worry about right now and their actions to date are designed to show that Microsoft has changed and, in doing so, to remove the danger of various anti-trust rulings. But has anyone considered that the potential impact of the browser wars is not really good for consumers? Competition is healthy. Web standards are to be applauded. Interfering in commercial markets because someone cried foul when no-one wanted their product should not be encouraged, however good the product may be.

So, is Windows 7 E Edition dead? Probably, but the key statement in Microsoft’s press release is this:

“We’ve been open both with the Commission and with our customers and partners that if the ballot screen proposal is not accepted for some reason, then we will have to consider alternative paths, including the reintroduction of a Windows 7 E version in Europe”

For those of us working on global Windows 7 solutions there are still some questions unanswered, and the 7E uncertainty may continue for a while yet.

Useful Links: July 2009

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

Hyper-V is now supported on flash drives

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week I wrote about booting Windows from a USB flash drive.

This had been a “pet project” of mine for a few months and, just after I finally got around to doing it, Stephen Rose blogged about a tool to help you prepare the USB drive to boot from VHD. Oh well, that’s life – I can’t get the time back – but anyway, I enjoyed working out the answers for myself.

Today, I’ve seen a post from the Windows virtualisation team about the release of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. It’s mostly a rehash of the long-running argument that Hyper-V (Server) costs less than ESX (i) and it probably does, even when factoring in the cost of the management tools but the real cost savings with virtualisation come from reduced power consumption (which will depend on the hardware used, and the consolidation ratios achieved) and operational improvements (i.e. not just running a virtualised infrastructure in the same way as for a physical one) so I’d take the messages from either Microsoft or VMware with a pinch of salt. Perhaps understandably for software companies, both focus too much on the cost of hardware and software rather than the cost of service delivery, which is what really matters to IT Managers.

More significantly from my point of view, the Microsoft’s Windows Virtualization Team also announced formal support for booting Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 from flash memory:

“Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 includes the unique ability (compared to Windows Server Hyper-V) to boot from flash. We’re making the documentation available to our OEM partners as part of the OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK). Boot from flash is specifically designed for our OEM partners who want to ship an embedded Hyper-V hypervisor and thus will be supported via our OEM partners.”

“So what”, you may ask. Well, this means that Hyper-V Server servers can now be diskless (e.g. boot from SAN) and treated as a commodity appliance. For organisations that still see a version of Windows as an operating system (any version of Windows – even if it’s just server core running Hyper-V) and so internal cross-charging mechanisms effectively tax virtualisation hosts as a full operating system, this is a step forward. It gets even better when considering that Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is based on the Enterprise Edition of Windows Server (the previous version was based on Standard Edition) so it supports clustering and hence live migration.

I had heard something about flash support from a contact at HP (after I got it working!) but had seen nothing formally via the MVP programme; however this is the way that OEMs “embed” VMware ESXi (at least one vendor told me that they use an internally-mounted USB drive for ESXi – I’m not sure if that’s the way it works for all of them). Of course, running the OS from an inexpensive USB flash drive may be fine for a hypervisor that, once loaded into memory, requires little disk access but it’s certainly not a recommended solution for a full operating system – for that you would need better quality flash memory, such as a solid state disk (SSD).

Windows 7 E Edition update (and some ideas for downloading a browser from the command line)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

After the Windows 7 announcements and late night blogging I was pretty burned out so I took a day off at the end of last week. As it happened, that was when Microsoft finally came out and made a statement about the whole European mess. Based on this latest statement, a ballot screen idea is definitely on the table and, if accepted, there will be no need for an E Edition without a web browser – Europe can have the same editions as the rest of the world (almost – I imagine there will still be legal requirement for N edition as that relates to a different, and equally pointless, legal case).

Ironically, Opera, who started this whole nonsense, will probably lose out. As Microsoft’s James O’Neill tweeted back to Mary Jo Foley (whose blog post on Microsoft’s decision to offer European users a browser choice in Windows 7 covers all the details):

“@maryjofoley If a ballot screen is alphabetical with opera last (after Apple, Google, and Mozilla) you can bet they’ll go crying back.”

[jamesone on Twitter]

“@maryjofoley Also – how many browsers on the ballot ? I don’t think opera is in the top 3 by share”

[jamesone on Twitter]

James is often pretty forthright in his views – and he works for Microsoft – but he’s spot on here. For what it’s worth, I think that most users will download Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer (IE) – because it’s from Microsoft, who make the operating system they will have just purchased – or Mozilla Firefox (for those who would prefer a third-party browser). Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Opera, etc. will remain also-rans, whatever their merits (of course, Safari will continue to dominate on OS X and Chrome will be integral to Google’s new Linux distro).

Even if you do get hold of E Edition (i.e. a copy of Windows without Internet Exploder built in), there are a number of workarounds posted, like Rafael Rivera’s suggestion of exploiting Windows Media Player to download a browser. Rafael is a smart guy but there’s a much simpler way – ftp.exe (the command line FTP client in Windows) – or, for that matter, FTP site access from Explorer. Actually, I put a port of wget onto many of my systems so that would even give me command line HTTP access to pull down a browser. The smartest idea I saw was using mshta.exe to access a website (e.g. mshta http://www.markwilson.co.uk/). I haven’t checked to see if that executable is still present when Internet Explorer is uninstalled (I doubt it), but it sounds like a nice command to know about anyway.

[Update: It looks like XP and Vista users will also get presented with a ballot screen – not sure how Microsoft Update will determine that we are in Europe though… IP address? Product SKU?]

What (and where) is SharePoint Server 2009?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I came across an interesting dialog box last week whilst trying to connect to a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site with the SharePoint Designer 2010 technical preview.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer cannot be used to edit web sites on servers prior to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2009. To edit these sites, you need to use SharePoint Designer 2007.The dialog told me that Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is needed to work with older versions of SharePoint Server but interestingly it referred to the version it wanted as SharePoint Server 2009… I’ve never heard of this (there is a new version of SharePoint for 2010, and presumably a new WSS 4.0 at the same time) but I guess no-one got around to changing the error message before the bits were shipped for the Office 2010 technical preview.

In the meantime, Bjørn Furuknap raises an interesting point… where’s the value in a technical preview of a product that doesn’t work with the existing server platform? There is a Technical Preview for SharePoint Server 2010 – but until that opens up to a wider audience it does seem a little strange that SharePoint Designer is part of the Office Technical Preview instead of the SharePoint Server one!