A little while ago Veeam released a nifty little tool called the “Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V”. You can download it from here: http://hyperv.veeam.com/free-task-manager-hyper-v-performance-monitoring/ So what is it? What does it do?...

Yesterday, I posted about a new version of RDCMan – where one of the new features was the ability to connect directly to virtual machines.  Since then, I have had a number of people ask me about how to actually make this work.  So here we go...

Anyone who is familiar with RDCMan will be thrilled to hear that there is an updated version available! For those of you who are new to RDCMan – it is a tool that allows you to easily manage multiple remote desktop sessions: The updated version introduces...

Yesterday, we announced that we would be releasing updated integration components over Windows Update from now on in (more details here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2014/11/11/hyper-v-integration-components-are-available-through...

There are a number of new features and functionality for Hyper-V in the Windows 10 Technical Preview. One of these features is that you can now add and remove network adapters from running virtual machines.  Specifically – you can add and remove...

Next week I will be in Barcelona, talking about all the cool stuff we are doing with virtualization in the next release of Windows Server.  Here are my session details: Title: CDP-B225 Software Defined Compute in the Next Release of Windows Server...

This morning Satya and Scott presented on Microsoft’s strategy for cloud.  If you missed it you can watch the recording here: http://news.microsoft.com/2014/10/20/cloud-event-webcast/ You can also read more about the announcements that were made...

[Warning! This blog post is nothing to do with Hyper-V or virtualization.  It is Friday night and I am playing computer games!] It has been a long busy week of working on Hyper-V – and now it is time for me to unwind.  After playing a couple...

Last weekend I was looking for a deck of cards, and I discovered this deck in one of my desk drawers: Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Windows Server 2003 R2 – Play your strongest hand.  How things have changed since then, it is amazing to think about...

When I first tried to perform a physical to virtual migration with the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0 – I immediately hit this error message: After a bit of poking around, I was able to figure out the problem.  Microsoft Virtual Machine...

Yesterday we released the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0.  You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42497 It has a staggering amount of features.  Including the ability to convert physical computers...

Our storage performance team has published a fascinating new whitepaper, available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44300 This whitepaper steps you through the configuration and testing of a top-of-the-line Hyper-V cluster...

Today we released the Windows Server Technical Preview.  You can read more about this, and how to get the bits yourself, over on the Server & Cloud Blog . Some other resources that are available right now are: The Windows Server Technical Preview...

If you install Ubuntu 14.04 inside a Hyper-V virtual machine – you automatically get all the integration components and virtualized drivers.  Including the Hyper-V video driver.  However, if you try to change the screen resolution inside your...

A Microsoft employee recently contacted us with this issue: “When I try and attach a virtual hard disk to a generation 2 virtual machine – I get an error message that says ‘Error applying Hard Drive changes’” It took a bit of conversation – but eventually...

This afternoon – an email arrived with the following question for me: “I’m working with on a Hyper-V migration with an import-vm component. I saw what I believe is your post on importing incompatible VMs. We are experiencing an issue where the incompatibility...

I have talked about Posterpedia before.  It is a very handy application that allows you to access electronic versions of our detailed Windows Server Architectural posters.  Well, the authors have released an updated version of it which is a...

While working on a system recently, I imported an old virtual machine – which then failed to start with this error message: What to do?  Well – thankfully the solution is already documented here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2927313/en-us But...

In my house I have two Hyper-V servers running multiple virtual machines with dynamic memory enabled. This can make it a bit tricky when I want to create a new virtual machine - and I need to figure out the best server to use. Thankfully - this little...

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the fact that Windows Server 2012 R2 is not supported on top of Windows Server 2008 R2 . This generated a lot of feedback about the need to improve our documentation for which operating systems are supported on...

The Hyper-V documentation team recently released the Virtualization Fabric Design Considerations Guide. You can download this document here: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Virtualization-Fabric-e9402b76 Document Overview: This guide details a series...

I have been asked this question a couple of times recently.  The odd thing, to me anyway, is that most of the people who have asked me have stated: I read this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794868(v=ws.10).aspx about supported...

I retweeted this late last week, but wanted to mention it here on my blog.  Emulex has just published a blog post talking about a known issue that is causing network connectivity problems for Hyper-V VMs when using Emulex network adapters. ...

Late last week we announced “Azure Site Recovery”.   This is a new offering that allows you to have Hyper-V virtual machines in your environment replicating to Azure.  This gives you the ultimate protection from site failure. You can read...

I was recently reading our documented Best Practices for running Linux on Hyper-V and noticed this section: Use I/O scheduler NOOP for better disk I/O performance. The Linux kernel has four different I/O schedulers to reorder requests with different algorithms...