Taylor Brown's Blog

Update 12/5/12: I was reviewing blog posts with the highest hit count and to my surprise this post is still receiving more than 10 hits per day on average…  In many ways I though this article would have lost it’s relevance given that pretty much...

After I finished writting this I relized it got a bit long... - I guess I had a lot to talk about! Hope you enjoy it (or at least find it mildly useful) Hyper-V implements a feature known as snapshots, this should not be confused with a...

Over the last few months I have gotten a lot of questions about backing up Hyper-V virtual machines… Do you run the backup software in the virtual machine or on the parent or do you just “snapshot” the virtual machine?  Some of the confusion has...

Update 12/5/12 A lot has changed since 2008 and many things have stayed the same… I wanted to provide an update to some of the most commonly viewed posts and this was one of them. For updated information on this topic please refer to my latest...

I think it might be best to start at ground zero with this topic and explain what a snapshot really is and how it work’s (if you already know skip a head…).  Hyper-V introduced a new feature called a snapshot – snapshots allow you to capture and...

It must be white paper week :) – today we posted a great document discussing virtual hard disk (VHD) performance with Windows Server 2008/Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 R2/Microsoft Hyper-V R2.  It’s about 35 pages long and goes into great...

This is effectively and update from one my very old posts Hyper-V WMI: KVP Exchange aka Data Exchange (Retrieving and Modifying Parent/Host KVP’s) which still receives a lot of traffic.  The same code from back in 2008 still works today even on Windows...

PDC is just around the corner now – I am giving the dry run of my talk tomorrow morning, so of course I am working on my demo’s today…  Just to give you a bit of a teaser here’s one of the scripts that I am using in one of my demo’s… This script...

I  got a great question based on yesterday’s post (by the way my e-mail was blocking a lot of external messages that’s fixed now so I apologize to anyone I missed a mail from).  The person was asking how they could figure out what physical disk...

Hyper-V will be well represented at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this year. Additional sessions where posted today ( http://www.microsoftpdc.com/Agenda/Sessions.aspx ) and they include two Hyper-V sessions. The first is Developing...

Since I did my last post on snapshots I have gotten several comments and few e-mails asking how to map ReturnValues to actual human readable strings. I guess not every one just knows that 32773 is Invalid Parameter… Well after many hours of asking and...

Update 12/5/12 A lot has changed since 2008 and many things have stayed the same…  I wanted to provide an update to some of the most commonly viewed posts and this was one of them. For updated information on this topic please refer to my latest post...

Updated 2/23 – Added VHD File Size and Fixed a Few Bugs. This is a follow up on my previous post on Hyper-V WMI: What VHD’s/Physical Disks Are Associated With a Virtual Machine? .  I had been getting questions about how to better identify what disks...

So you want to use passthough disks with Hyper-V cool – but how do you script attaching them?  Well here’s your answer…  But first you need to decide if you are going to attach them to the virtual IDE controller or the virtual SCSI controller...

Back in December we released Hyper-V Beta, followed by RC0 in March, RC1 in May and now RTM in June!  This has been one heck of a ride – it’s pretty cool to see this feature go from design, to code, to binaries, to working binaries.  And it...

I hope everyone is enjoying Hyper-V RC1 (yep I just linked to my own post -shamless maybe) but, as promissed here's some more WMI goodness. Title got your attention? Well this is a two part post… First I will show how to use the Shutdown IC to initiate...

I have officially given up on the “Hyper-V WMI Using PowerShell Scripts” serious, not because of lack of interest but because or extreme interest implying that I would need to do Part 5, 6, 7, 99… Counting past 5 is hard so from now on I will just title...

On Sunday I showed how to add registry keys to the guest from the host ( Hyper-V WMI: KVP Exchange aka Data Exchange (Adding New Items From Parent/Host) ) and on Monday I showed how to read registry key’s written by the guest from the host ( Hyper-V WMI...

There is a newly released update for Hyper-V that will increase the support limit from 16 logical processors (cores) to 24 logical processors!  Since we support up to eight virtual processors for every one logical processor (8:1 over subscription...

I get a lot of questions from people asking what servers have been tested and work with Hyper-V.  The Windows Server Catalog ( www.windowsservercatalog.com ) has a hardware category specifically for Hyper-V that lists all servers that have passed...

Many of you know I have been a fan of PowerShellPlus for quite a while, but I was turned on to a new editor the other day that’s pretty slick – PowerGUI . Winner of this years Windows IT Pro Magazine’s Best of Tech Ed IT Pro Breakthrough Product Award...

If you are running a cluster with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and three or more nodes you should install this KB. KB Link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2531907 Symptoms Consider the following scenario: You configure a failover cluster...

In Windows Server 8 we added the ability to live migrate virtual machines without the requirement of a cluster i.e. standalone live migration .  For this feature to work the storage the virtual machine is using must be available to both Hyper-V severs...

You may have already read my previous two posts on Hyper-V remote management using the UI and configuring Constrained Delegation, for some people that will not be an option or is just undesirable...  Well with Windows 8 and the joy of PowerShell...

  Windows Server 8 brings support for storing and running Hyper-V virtual machines on SMB2.2 file shares, which is pretty handy, especially with the new Scale-Out/Continuously Available file server features in Windows Server 8.  However it does...