Earlier this week I saw a tweet from the MIX 2011 conference that highlighted how Microsoft’s Office 365 software as a service platform runs entirely on their Hyper-V hypervisor. There are those (generally those who have a big investment in VMware technologies) who say Microsoft’s hypervisor lacks the features to make it suitable for use … Continue reading Microsoft Hyper-V: A reminder of where we’re at
I have to admit that I’ve tuned out a bit on the virtualisation front over the last year. It seems that some vendors are ramming VDI down our throats as the answer to everything; meanwhile others are confusing virtualisation with “the cloud”. I’m also doing less hands-on work with technology these days too and I … Continue reading Hyper-V R2 service pack 1, Dynamic Memory, RemoteFX and virtual desktops
In order to avoid man in the middle attacks, Hyper-V’s Virtual Machine Connection (vmconnect.exe) requires certificates for a successful connection. At some point, the certificates expire, resulting in an error message when connecting to virtual machines, as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 967902, which also includes details of an update to resolve the issue, … Continue reading Extending certificate validity to avoid mouse/video refresh issues with the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Connection
There’s been a lot of talk about how Microsoft’s Dynamic Memory capability in Hyper-V R2 compares with similar features from VMware – including the pros/cons of each approach. Because that’s been so well-covered elsewhere, I’ll avoid it here (from the VMware perspective, check out Eric Gray (vCritical), Â for Microsoft Ben Armstrong is your man and, … Continue reading Hyper-V R2 Dynamic Memory: over-subscription vs. over-commitment
A few weeks ago, I rebuilt a recently decommissioned server to run as an infrastructure test and development rig at home. I installed Windows Server 2008 R2, enabled the Hyper-V role and all was good until I started to configure my networks, during which I experienced a “blue screen of death” (BSOD) – never a … Continue reading Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V crash turns out to be an Intel driver issue
I don’t often work with passthrough disks in Hyper-V but, after configuring my Netgear ReadyNAS as an iSCSI target earlier this evening, I wanted to use it as storage for a new virtual machine. Try as I might, I could not get Hyper-V Manager to accept a physical disk as a target, despite having tried … Continue reading Physical disks can only be added to Hyper-V VMs when the disk is offline
A couple of years back, I was running Windows Server 2008 on my everyday notebook PC so that I could work with Hyper-V. That wasn’t really ideal and, these days, I’m back on a client OS – Windows 7 as it happens… Even so, I’ve been discussing the concept of a developer workstation with my … Continue reading Creating a Hyper-V workstation
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 … Continue reading Injecting network drivers into a Hyper-V Server (or Windows Server) installation
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 … Continue reading Hyper-V is now supported on flash drives
It’s reasonably well known that it’s possible to expose local resources (including local drives) on a remote computer when connecting using the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection client. Using this method, the local drives are exposed on the remote computer using Windows Explorer (e.g. drive on computername). Last week, I was working with a Hyper-V Server … Continue reading Copying files to/from a Hyper-V Server or Windows Server (server core) computer over RDP