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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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:...

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...

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...

I have talked to a handful of people over the years who have had to deal with Hyper-V servers that have suffered disk failure.  This can be quite problematic to diagnose and troubleshoot – so I wanted to spend some time digging into what happens...

A number of readers have (rightly) complained that I have not been talking about gaming inside virtual machines lately.  So with that in mind – here is Plants vs. Zombies running on Windows XP on Hyper-V: The game is completely playable – though...

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...