In Windows Vista we introduced “BitLocker” to Windows – a native full disk encryption technology for Windows.  Most people immediately saw the potential for BitLocker on laptops.  Encrypting your laptop meant that if you were ever unfortunate enough to lose your laptop (through theft or forgetfulness...

A recent post to the Hyper-V TechNet Forums asked what could be done to protect against ARP spoofing from an untrusted virtual machine. If you are unfamiliar with ARP spoofing – you can read more about it at WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP_spoofing – but the short summary it is a process...

Last week we released an update for the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V.  You can download the 3.1 release here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26837 Key details are that this release supports the following Linux distributions: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and 6.1 x86...

I realize that I am running late on recent news at the moment – but things have been busy On Tuesday this week we published a whitepaper that goes into great depth about using SQL Server with Dynamic Memory.  You can download it from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh372970.aspx This...

This is a bit old – but I am still getting questions from people about it so I wanted to get a blog post down.  If you have a cluster with three or more nodes – you may encounter problems with CSV after installing SP1.  If you are seeing any of the following problems:   The Validate SCSI...

Hyper-V MVP – Aidan Finn – has just published a fantastic whitepaper about dynamic memory.  Go and check it out now: http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=11289 Cheers, Ben

Last April we released the first Hyper-V Best Practice Analyzer .  This has been one of our top Hyper-V related downloads – and we have received lots of good feedback about this tool. Last week we released an update for the Hyper-V Best Practice Analyzer that you can download here: http://support...

I have been using SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) more and more in my home environment of late.  But I also keep getting myself in trouble – usually because I keep on trying to do things the “Hyper-V way”. Recently– I tried to do a quick storage migration of a running virtual machine...

I am very happy to see that the final version of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 is now available for everyone.  You can either wait for it to appear through Windows Update – or you can go and download it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c3202ce6-4056-4059-8a1b-3a9b77cdfdda...

The ever popular Hyper-V Architectural Poster has recently been updated for Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 – and now has sections for Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX: You can download the full version from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=93c814d0-fe4b-4d5b-b280-1b9807ec9933...

When we released Windows Server 2008 R2 we added the ability to make a virtual machines processor more compatible for migration between different hardware platforms (details here ). Here is a PowerShell script to do this for you: # Function for handling WMI jobs / return values Function...

I often get asked what my recommendation is for a high-end desktop computer for the virtualization enthusiast. The root problem that causes this question is the well noted issues with Hyper-V and high-end video cards . Thankfully – this can now be a problem of the past. With Windows Server 2008...

If you need to change the boot order of a virtual machine programmatically (so that it will boot off of the network first – for example) it is relatively straight forward: # Function for handling WMI jobs / return values Function ProcessResult($result, $successString, $failureString) ...

Once you start to get more and more virtual machines, and more and more Hyper-V servers, in your environment it can get quite hard to keep track of where a specific virtual machine is actually running. System Center Virtual Machine Manager can help you out here – but what if you are not sitting at the ...

There is a lot of confusion about how time synchronization works in Hyper-V – so I wanted to take the time to sit down and write up all the details. There are actually multiple problems that exist around keeping time inside of virtual machines – and Hyper-V tackles these problems in different...

Many people have been asking me about my setup for the dynamic memory demonstration that I did in a number of locations earlier this year. I have been telling myself that I would take the time to polish up my demo scripts and post them here – but I have been too busy lately – so instead you...

Anyone who has worked with virtualization software knows that sometimes the hardest question to answer is “but is this configuration supported?”.  This is a question that Microsoft has spent a lot of time trying to answer – and a while ago we started the Server Virtualization Validation Program...

I have received a number of questions about how to go about setting up remote management of our free Hyper-V server (not the one that is part of Windows).  So I thought I would sit down and write up a set of blog posts to talk about how to do this.  Today I am going to talk about how to remotely...

Last week I discussed some of the changes that were made to the Hyper-V manager in response to feedback from beta users of the service pack 1 release.  Today I am going to talk about the changes that were made to the virtual machine settings user interface: There are three changes that have been...

In the release candidate build of service pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 we have updated some parts of the Dynamic Memory user interface. There were some top-level goals that we had with the Dynamic Memory user interface in the Hyper-V Manager (our MMC interface).  Specifically we wanted users...

With the release candidate build of service pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 you can now enabled Dynamic Memory on the standard and web editions of Windows Server.  However – there is a slightly different process to do this on the various versions of Windows server:   Windows Server 2003 ...

Well, I have finished upgrading all of my Hyper-V servers from the SP1 beta release to the SP1 release candidate – so I thought I would share some notes from my experience. Unfortunately you cannot go directly from the beta release to the release candidate – instead you need to uninstall the beta (taking...

You can download Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Release Candidate right now – from here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/sp1.aspx As well as including the usual bug fixes, etc… there are some specific changes for dynamic memory in there: User interface changes in response to feedback we...

A little while ago David posted a really handy solution for evacuating a Hyper-V cluster node on shutdown automatically. The issue that he is trying to address is that normally you should not just shutdown a node in a cluster, rather you should manually move all virtual machines off of the cluster node...

Now that the Hyper-V integration services are included in the official Linux builds – I wanted to try out a Linux distribution that is not officially supported by Microsoft and see what was involved in getting it all working. With the recent release of Ubuntu 10.10 I thought I would try out their...