Welcome to blog week!

re: Welcome to blog week!

Mike — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:43:54 GMT

I would like to see recommendations, if any, for placing multi vCPU VM's on a host. Especially with regards to overcommit (more vCPU's than lCPU's) and mixing single vCPU VM's with multi vCPU VM's on the same host.

How does Hyper-V handle multi vCPU VM's?

Maybe details on how the scheduler works. Mappings of vCPU's to lCPU's.

re: Welcome to blog week!

Guy Smith-Ferrier — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:39:11 GMT

Ben,

I would be interested in a blog post revealing the command line parameters for VMWindow.exe in Windows Virtual PC.

Guy

re: Welcome to blog week!

Red! — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:49:47 GMT

Well you ask about comments about the blog but what I have are comments about where Virtual PC is going... You mention that you're supposed to "Stay competitive" and "reach out for customer opinion"; now from what I understand your main "customer" is Microsoft itself, since the only target operating systems it now officially supports is Windows XP, Vista and 7, where as 2007sp1 supported a whole slew of other operating systems. It's no longer a Virtual "PC" it's a "Virtual Windows". This is enforced by

* The lack of GUI setup for floppy support

* The lack of DOS SB Support

* The lack of shared DOS directories

* Being forced to find "hacks" or "disable features" to have 24bit and font smoothing in the hosted Windows XP, though I undestand this is because of the new intergration mode.

All of these which were PERFECTLY FINE in the previous version of the software, and all of those features mostly supported by "competitors".

To make it worst, I cannot (officially) install 2007sp1 on Windows 7 to use these features!

There is not a single useful "Support" link on the Virtual PC support page; they all point to almost totally useless pages about how it should be better than the previous version, what it can do, but not what it can no longer do...

Now what I don't understand is, as your blog seems to show, that you loved what Virtual PC did and supported. Yet what you now seem to work on is something else altogether which doesn't seem to abide by what you used to love :(

re: Welcome to blog week!

John — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:34:53 GMT

I think this was mentioned but some sort of Best practice performance type guide for Hyper-V that is readable. I'm sorry if any of the below ideas were previously posted. Any of the below would be useful I think. Specifically:

Storage recomendations (local/SAN) for various server types (file/mail/database)and RAID level.

Networking recomendations for the same server types. seperate connections for each server or can they share connections (mail/file server together, etc.)

How to run performance monitors (network/storage) easily without over complicating it and what type of results are bad/good. Can the monitoring me automated with graphs that display data over time, how?

What types of pitfalls to avoid when provisioning storage for VM's. Put them all on same partition? The system partition? Which RAID level is best for 5 Hyper-V 2008 server guests for instance.

re: Welcome to blog week!

Johnny — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:19:28 GMT

The challenge: I use Win7 on a Hyper-V machine for MSN Live, Facebook and Tweeter.

I have two "zones" on my firewall, one private and one DMZ. From the private zone,

I created firewall rules that make me unable to use MSN Live, Facebook and Tweeter.

On the Hyper-V (2008 R2 Core) I run a Win7 machine that's in the DMZ.

I am using RDP from computers on the private zone to Win7 machine in the DMZ.

I want to connect my USB web-cam on the visualized Win7 machine in DMZ.

How can this be resolved?

re: Welcome to blog week!

anony.muos — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:15:42 GMT

I so hate the fact that Windows Virtual PC requires processor virtualization.

re: Welcome to blog week!

william — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:42:21 GMT

An interesting topics could be Hyper-V on server core along with best practice in implmentation. Personally I have quite a few feature requests.... Hyper-V for the desktop, i.e. support for USB/multi-monitors.

re: Welcome to blog week!

Thomas Dallmair — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:08:53 GMT

+1 for x64 desktop virtualization

However that's a feature request, not a blog post :)

Regarding your blog, I would keep the automatic closing of comments after 60 days. Raymond Chen has it set to 14 days and even that is ok. For me it's more important that you answer comments to recent topics than about anything back from the dark ages.

On topics maybe you have the time to write something problem-related. For instance, we've been unable to get Hyper-V running at all, 'cause whenever we tried things were going fine until after a few minutes with a guest running the whole machine crashed with a BSOD. We've been unable to point to special circumstances that lead to a crash, but it has never worked for us. Not tried Hyper-V on 2008 R2 though, maybe it works this time. So, what problems have you seen in the wild?

Regards, Ooh

re: Welcome to blog week!

Riccardo — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:19:50 GMT

Hi there

Could you get some more technical details as to why Hyper-v cannot be ported to work on Windows 7. It would be really great if the virtulization team could spend some time putting together any sort of solution.

Failing that, any more news on the future of Virtual PC and x64.

Thx Riccardo

re: Welcome to blog week!

Daniel — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:37:20 GMT

Virtual PC 2007 should be supported on Windows 7. Not every PC has a Processor that supports Hardware Virtualization. Need a Service Pack 2 for V-PC 2007