September, 2010

Have you started looking at dynamic memory in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1? If you have not – why?? I have been using dynamic memory on my home server infrastructure since January at the begining of this year, and have become completely addicted to it. ...

After writing my script to allow a non-administrative user to control Hyper-V – I started thinking about how it would be nice if I could easily add and remove users from being Hyper-V administrators – without having to run a script each time.  Which...

A long time ago I talked about how to configure Hyper-V to allow a non-administrative user to control all of Hyper-V . As a security conscious user I never use an administrative account – unless it is absolutely critical. But lately I have been...

Okay, this is not actually a virtualization related post – but is a purely about PowerShell. None the less – it is something that I use quite often when scripting Hyper-V – so I thought I would post it here. The long and the short...

After my adventures with Windows Home Server , I wanted to make sure that al my data was correctly replicated before trying to make any other configuration changes.  Unfortunately, Windows Home Server does not let you know what it is doing in the...

Last week I had one of the hard disks in my Hyper-V server fail.  Having had to deal with this a couple of times over the last few years, I had little trouble working through the process of fixing my system, but I thought I would write up the details...

If you looked closely at the sample script I provided yesterday , you will have noticed that there are actually 3 memory settings for dynamic memory. VirtualQuantity (which is called “Startup RAM” in the user interface), Limit (which is called...

Here is a sample script that allows you to configure a virtual machine to use either dynamic memory or static memory: # Function for handling WMI jobs / return values Function ProcessResult($result, $successString, $failureString) ...

I have wanted to poke around the Hyper-V performance counters with PowerShell for a while now – and the arrival of dynamic memory gives me a good excuse to do so. Here is a script that will display all the current dynamic memory performance information...

I received this question from our product support team this week: “How do you delete the saved state of a virtual machine through WMI?” What they are refering to here is the fact that – through the Hyper-V Manager user interface...

Moving on in my “scripting dynamic memory” series, the next thing to look at is how to get the current memory usage and memory available data that we display in the Hyper-V manager. You can get the current memory usage by just looking at MSVM_Memory...

With the availability of dynamic memory in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 there are some changes to how you need to handle memory as a scripter / developer. The WMI API changes are now documented here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc136856(VS.85...

Most people I know who have spent a lot of time with Hyper-V have had the experience of accidentally taking too much memory away from the parent partition.  This happens when they start too many virtual machines – and all of a sudden the performance...

Jeff has discussed this at some length over on the virtualization team blog, but as a general rule of thumb we believe that it is much better to have paging occur inside the guest operating system rather than at the virtualization layer (if paging is...

With Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 we have added a number of new performance counters for dynamic memory.  These counters allow you to get some extra insight into what is actually happening with memory on your Hyper-V server.  The counters are...