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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Virtualization Review posted the results of a performance shootout between Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX, and Citrix XenServer…  The launched three tests against the various platforms.  First was a small number of heavy workload systems, ...

  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...

Hyper-V virtual machines have configuration options that control what happens when the parent/host server shuts down, start’s up, or if a virtual machine’s worker process terminates unexpectedly.  The first two conditions (parent/host shutdown, startup...

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...

The Hyper-V best practice in traditional production environments is that any physical network interface used by guest virtual machines is dedicated and isolated to guest only traffic and not shared with the management operating system (host). This recommendation...

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...

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...

In the coming days/weeks some of you may see some new errors from Hyper-V.  The first is an error when you try and use VMConnect or SCVMM to connect to a running virtual machine – the error is “ Cannot connect to the virtual machine because the authentication...

The Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta has been posted on the download center along with an overview document and a setup and configuration guide. Please note that all features, support, configuration etc… is subject to change as this is a beta ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

So here’s the scenario you need or want to figure out which LUN is which on your cluster… On Tuesday I published part 1 where I utilized Get-ClusterParameter and the DiskUniqueIds property to enumerate LUN information for cluster storage, in part 2 I...

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...

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...

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...

  Ever since Hyper-V’s first beta I’ve had people ask about the ability to write there own custom interface to replace VMConnect.  Some wanted a windows application other’s wanted to write a web application.  The goal’s varied from wanting...

Unless you’ve been under a rock all day you know that Windows 7 Beta was announced and released last night – along with Windows 7 Beta we also announced and released Server 2008 R2 (formally known as Windows 7 Server).  If you have an MSDN subscription...

I originally wrote this script for my own clusters to upgrade them from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server “8” Beta and since then I have shared it with a few others who also found it very helpful.  I had some designs on improving it but decided...