Adam Singer : Hyper-V

Hyperordinary

Adam Singer — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:27:00 GMT

Apparently, if there's one thing that can get me blogging up a storm it's Hyper-V. I just can't get enough! The word of the day is "snapshots". Learn it, love it, and dance with joy.

I currently have two different main machines I've been prodding over the last two days. One is my development machine that I previously mentioned, and the other is a test machine where I'm testing install on workgroup, a domain, with different settings, etc. and storing states that I want to poke at more later - all by using snapshots. Without them, this work would have taken at least twice as long, either because Virtual Server's undo disks suffered performance-wise or I would be reimaging machines to much cleaner states than need be.

How can it get any better, you ask? Why, how about with a simple scriptably WMI interface that already has a great library of tools in a Codeplex project! Powershell plus Hyper-V makes the virtual world go 'round. If you do any manual Hyper-V management, check it out.

Virtual Machine has gained a level

Adam Singer — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:01:00 GMT

I just wrote this up for a coworker who asked me how to move a virtual machine from being hosted by Virtual Server to Hyper-V. First off, I'd like to say that I am a big fan of this type of upgrade. The first step to improving your virtualization experience is realizing that your experience could be improved, after all :)

In any case, it should be a fairly trivial move and would function on Virtual PC 2004/2007 machines, as well. The only thing you'll need is the vhd(s) of your current virtual machine.

Uninstall the VM Additions from the VPC prior to uninstalling Virtual Server
Copy the vhd file to your Hyper-V machine
Create a new VM using the VHD and start it
Once it starts up, open the Hyper-V view of the machine from the Hyper-V role in Server Manager
Select the Action menu, Insert Integration Services Disk, and proceed with the installation.

That should basically be it all you need -- everything else should just work. Note that you won’t be able to use external networking with a normal Hyper-V network adaptor until you have the Integration Services installed. If you need network before that you’ll have to shut the virtual machine off and add a Legacy Network Adaptor. For example, you would need this if you have Win2003 prior to SP1 since the Integration Services require SP2.

Enjoy, and happy virtualizing!

Hyper-V: They've gone plaid!

Adam Singer — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:02:00 GMT

The title is a reference to "Spaceballs", of course.

Recently, I've been doing all of my development on a machine that doesn't exist. This both amuses me greatly and increases my productivity.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm using a Hyper-V guest OS as a development machine with the host running Windows Server 2008 x64. The machine has two harddrives, one of which has two partitions (OS and programs on one, vhd files and other persistent data on the other), and the other of which is actually offline from the perspective of the host OS.

Instead, my development guest machine has complete control of this second drive and uses it as my version control enlistment store. That means that every time I roll back to my earlier snapshot of that machine to install the latest pre-release development tools and reattach the drive its contents match what TFS says it should have and I don't need to run a complete force get.

The host has 2 processors so I've set my development guest to have two as well (otherwise building would be slower). I haven't noticed any performance degradation in terms of TFS operations, build time, etc. on the dev box and have seen significant improvements in the time it takes me to get up to the latest dogfood bits (yum yum). In addition, while the dev box is getting prepared I can still be checking e-mail, the Visual Studio Team System forums, or other similar work on my host OS.

I've been running this configuration since a little before the Hyper-V RC was released and am very content. I've also spent a good deal of time testing TFS configurations on Hyper-V and am very pleased with the snapshotting functionality in particular. If you haven't installed the RTM version, do it now!