March, 2008

A lot of people have been asking about how to check if their AMD system is capable of running Hyper-V.  Well AMD have just released a tool that enables you to check your system for compatibility.  If you go here you can download the AMD Virtualization™...

I am feeling lazy today - but thankfully my colleagues have been working hard :-) Mike Kolitz has done a great series on installing the Hyper-V RC0 bits - with SysPrep , Unattended Installation , and Offline Servicing . While John Howard has done a two...

There have been some changes to the WMI management interfaces in the release candidate of Hyper-V from the previous beta release. While there have been no changes to the model, a number of the strings used in different places have been "cleaned up" to...

Hyper-V uses the "new" Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 style error messages - that look like this: What you may not know is that if you click anywhere on this error message (other than on the buttons - obviously) and press Ctrl + C you can...

The Hyper-V management tools (MMC snap-in and associated UI) are now available for download: x86: Update for Windows Vista (KB949758) x64: Update for Windows Vista x64 Edition (KB949758) These tools allow you to manage and interact with an installation...

A while ago I talked about how to use ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) to enable wireless support with Hyper-V .  Well, John Paul Cook has written a great article on how to do a similar thing using RRAS (Routing and Remote Access Service) : http...

In Hyper-V (and Virtual Server) we allow you to configure a CPU resource reservation, limit and relative weight.  This is usually used for providing performance guarantees for virtual machines - however - last weekend I found a rather obscure usage...

Over at Virtualization Review, Chris Wolf has posted an interesting article on combining Virtual Server VSS backup with VHD mounting to have a scheduled backup that only backs up a subset of files from inside a virtual machine. Go check it out: http...

After a lot of hard work I am proud to inform you that the release candidate of Hyper-V is now available. With this release we have added: Partial localization for German and Japanese Improved performance Support for Windows Server 2003 (x86) SMP, Windows...

A little while ago I stumbled upon the game Trilby: The Art of Theft.  This is a fun little game that I have enjoyed spending a couple of days playing (I have now completed it).  The basic concept of the game is to guide Trilby through a series...

When you choose to compact a virtual hard disk with Hyper-V a very interesting process is used.  The virtual hard disk is actually connected to the parent partition (but it is not mounted).  Windows then inspects the virtual hard disk. ...

Hyper-V adds the ability to increase the maximum size of a dynamically expanding or fixed-size virtual hard disk.  To do this you need to open the Edit Virtual Hard Disk Wizard (by selecting Edit Disk... from the Hyper-V manager), select the virtual...

A number of people have been asking me how snapshots actually work "under the covers". So here we go: When you take a snapshot of a running virtual machine: We pause the virtual machine. We create a new differencing disk for each virtual hard...

One of the features of Hyper-V is VLAN support. This is a little bit confusing - so let me explain how it works. For every virtual network adapter you connect to a virtual machine you can specify a VLAN ID to be used by that virtual machine. In order...

Just stumbled across some very thorough documentation on backing up Virtual Server with Acronis True Image and Microsoft Data Protection Manager: Backup and Recovery using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 and Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise...

Here is a handy tool to use with virtual machines.  BgInfo allows you to display information about the system on the desktop wallpaper including the computer name, IP address, service pack version, and more. This is useful when you have a large number...

For a while now I have been eyeing off the Asus EEE PC . I liked the look of it and wanted to get one as a 'mobile email client' to use at Microsoft. However there were two significant issues for me. The first was that it only supports a display of 800x480...

So this is a bit old - but somehow I missed this great post by my colleague, Sean Earp, on how to install Fedora 8 under Virtual PC 2007: http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/archive/2007/11/13/fedora-8-werewolf-on-virtual-pc-2007.aspx Cheers, Ben