Virtual Varia : Windows 7

Aero Glass? In my Virtual Machine? It’s more likely than you think…

mikekol — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:37:05 GMT

Back in 2006, I posted an article about how to get Glass running in a VM.
The trick was to use Remote Desktop on a Glass-enabled machine to TS into a VM which is running the same OS. If the build of the OS on your workstation is different than the one in the VM, Glass won’t work.

With the release of the Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 Release Candidate, this subject has come up again in a post from the RedmondPie.com folks. They noticed that if you enable the Integration Services in a Windows 7 VM, you’ll get Aero Glass!

This may be news, but it’s actually the same ol’ story. The reason that enabling Integration Services gives you Aero Glass is because it uses Remote Desktop technology to show you the video from the Virtual Machine. That also helps to explain why installing Vista (or a build of 7 that is different than the one on the host) doesn’t give you Glass.

Now, you might be asking yourself why – if this is true – do you not get Glass in Hyper-V while using VMConnect? After all, VMConnect uses Remote Desktop technology to show you the VM Video, too.

To explain this, I asked Ben Armstrong what was going on, just to make sure that I understood it correctly (for the record, I didn’t). Ben thought deeply for a second, and knew that the best way to explain this to me was to draw pretty pictures on my whiteboard. I’ve tried to reproduce them below¹:

*Windows Virtual PC*	*Hyper-V*

In the illustrations above, you can see that the architecture is somewhat similar between Windows Virtual PC and Hyper-V (with respect to video, anyway). In both cases, an application that uses the RDP ActiveX control (MSTSCAX.DLL), like VMWindow.exe or VMConnect.exe, for video remoting hooks into a process which hosts the RDP encoder. If no integration components are installed in the guest OS, video is handled by our emulated S3 video adapter, which gets passed back through to VMWindow or VMConnect.

If integration components are installed and enabled, there’s a different option.

In Hyper-V, the RDP encoder talks to the Video Virtual Device (VDEV), which communicates with the child partition via a communications bus called VMBus, allowing it to talk directly to the synthetic video adapter (SynthVid VSC) that is running in the child partition. SynthVid then sends frame buffers back across VMBus, back to the Video VDEV, where it’s picked up by the RDP encoder, finally making the video show up in VMConnect.

In Windows Virtual PC, the RDP encoder makes a connection to an RDP endpoint inside the guest OS via a communications bus called VPCBus. In this specific scenario, VPCBus is essentially acting as a network transport, allowing an RDP connection to be made from the host OS to the guest OS without the use of a network (which is why this works even if you don’t have a network adapter in your guest OS). Now, you don’t have an RDP connection to the guest all the time – when the guest boots there’s obviously no RDP endpoint to connect to. At that point, you’re using emulated video. As soon as the integration components come online and are successfully enabled, Windows Virtual PC creates a Remote Desktop connection to the guest OS, and seamlessly switches over to using that for video.

And that’s the secret sauce behind getting Glass in Windows Virtual PC and not in Hyper-V: Hyper-V transmits frame buffers which are then rendered into video by the RDP encoder, while Windows Virtual PC actually creates a Remote Desktop connection, which can use all of the pixie dust necessary for Aero remoting to work.

So why doesn’t Hyper-V do this too?

That’s a topic for another blog post.

¹Please note that these images are not necessarily technically accurate – their only purpose is to help demonstrate concepts relevant to the conversation.

The Virtualization Nation Podcast – Episode 3: Want to boot a physical computer from a VHD?

mikekol — Fri, 15 May 2009 05:00:41 GMT

Of course you do. And in this episode of the Virtualization Nation Podcast, I’ll show you how.

But first, a little background.

Earlier today, I posted a description of the new Native VHD integration in Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 on the Windows Virtualization Team blog, along with a link to a nifty little Powershell script called Install-WindowsImage.ps1 which I’ll talk about some other time. The main point of that post was to start getting the word out about Native VHD Boot.

So, what’s so special about this?

Well, put yourself in the shoes of a corporate network administrator (though, when I was a network admin, I didn’t wear shoes all that often). It’s really very common for a company to have a “base” Operating System image that they can apply to a server or workstation. This image is usually tweaked with some software and/or patches installed, or is specially configured in some other way.

If that’s the case, it’s possible that you would need to maintain two (or more) images: one for virtual machines (probably a VHD), and one for physical machines (maybe a WIM or a Ghost file).

With Native VHD Boot, you can finally have one, single base image that works everywhere. Your VHD can be booted in virtual machines, just like it always did, and it can also be used to boot your physical servers.

Ok, let’s get right to the heart of this thing.

To boot from a VHD, you need the following things:

A physical machine with the Windows 7 boot loader on it.
A VHD with a SKU of Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 (Enterprise and Ultimate only – sorry), or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

Now, you’ve got those things ready, right? You’re all set? You’ve read the VHD FAQ? Cool.

Ok. You can find instructions on how to configure your computer on various web pages and videos, but they all seem pretty lengthy.

Want something simple? Something easy to remember?

Of course you do.

You can watch me run through the steps in the video below, or download it here.

For those of you who don’t want to download a video for a “simple” command, here are the Cliff’s Notes:

Get to an elevated or WinPE command prompt.
Use your favorite VHD-creation method to install Windows in a VHD.
Use DiskPart or DiskMgmt.msc to attach your VHD as a drive on your computer, and give it a drive letter (V:\ for example).
Run BCDBOOT.EXE V:\Windows
Sit back, relax, and reboot your computer to start booting into your new OS.

Important Notes:

If you’re booting to a Dynamically Expanding VHD, make sure that you have enough room on your physical disk to hold the VHD as if it were fully expanded to its maximum size. If you don’t have enough space, you’ll get a bugcheck during boot.
Hibernation is disabled when booted to a VHD.
You can’t boot to a VHD that lives on a network share or a removable storage device.

The Virtualization Nation Podcast - Episode 2. Wait, what?

mikekol — Wed, 06 May 2009 06:28:00 GMT

Some of you may remember that, a long while ago, I asked what sort of things you'd like to see in a Virtualization-themed podcast. Though it's been over a year since that post, I've still been thinking about starting a podcast and talking with other people on my team about getting one together. The reaction has been positive so far. There are quite a few folks who seem interested in putting something together.

However, we haven't gotten down to planning any of the solid details quite yet, so a regular podcast is still aways off. But there's really no reason why I have to wait for everyone else... and so, I give you the first episode of The Virtualization Nation Podcast. Episode 2.

Wait, what?

Well, since I promised all of you some more WIM2VHD videos, and since I'm nearly gotten the whole process down (I wound up buying Sony's Vegas Movie Studio Platinum, or whatever it's called... and it crashes a lot. Like, really a lot.), I deciced to start releasing them as video podcasts. As such, we're just going to call the first WIM2VHD video I made 'Episode 1', and go from there.

So there you have it: We're not ready to start doing this regularly yet, and the format is likely to change around a lot, and we don't have the whole XML feed thing set up quite yet... but the next episode is ready!

Click here to download the .WMV file.

Announcing the Windows® Image to Virtual Hard Disk Converter (WIM2VHD)

mikekol — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 23:29:00 GMT

It was my New Years Resolution that I’d do an average of 2 blog posts per week this year. So far, I haven’t been doing a very good job of that, but I think I have a good excuse. I’ve been very busy with preparing to release a new tool, and now, I can finally announce it.

Fine citizens of the Virtualization Nation: I present to you the Windows® Image to Virtual Hard Disk Converter, or WIM2VHD as I like to call it.

WIM2VHD is a tool that will create a bootable VHD from a specified Windows 7 or 2008 R2 WIM image (like the INSTALL.WIM file that ships on the installation DVDs) without having to run Windows Setup. That means that you can a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine up and running much, much faster.

You can use these VHDs in Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Hyper-V, and … some other things, too. We’ll talk more about that later.

You can get WIM2VHD here.
(The release candidate has been released, too...)

I’ve done my best at creating some good documentation for WIM2VHD, which is available from the link above. Please make sure that you read the docs. If you have any questions, feel free to start a discussion thread at the WIM2VHD site.

Here’s a video I made introducing WIM2VHD, and showing it in action. More are one the way.

Please be aware, however, that while the underlying process of creating the VHDs is supported by Microsoft, WIM2VHD is not.

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Some awesome Windows 7 tricks

mikekol — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:23:44 GMT

Tim Sneath posted this last night, and I wanted to share it with all of you Windows 7 users out there.

Now, I’ve been using Windows 7 throughout the entire development process (since just after Vista RTM), and after reading through this list I actually came across some features that I didn’t know about previously.

I think my favorite features from that list are:

Who Stole My Browser?
Being able see what plugins might be causing my browser to behave like a pouting three-year-old is fantastic. It’s easy to do over the phone, and – this is the part I like the best – it’s easy to teach.
Installing from a USB Memory Stick
I just got an HP Mini 1000 netbook, and it runs 7 so amazingly smoothly. I’ve been installing it by using PXE boot from the Microsoft corporate network, but being able to install 7 from a USB key is equally as handy (especially since it would allow me to make customizations to the image before applying it. (You know how much I love the Windows AIK, right? There’s a new one specifically for Windows 7 over here.)
Command Junkies Only
I admit it. I’m addicted to the command-line. It’s faster for me to type a command than do something in the GUI, especially with Powershell (got v2 CTP3 yet?) Being able to open a command prompt from any arbitrary window is an amazing time-saver.

What are your favorite Windows 7 tricks?

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VIIrtualization: I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but the Windows 7 Beta is out

mikekol — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:14:00 GMT

You know… just in case you haven’t heard it. I’m sure there aren’t a lot of people talking about it or anything, so you might have missed it. (There’s some good information in that link – I highly advise you to click on it if you plan on getting the beta.)

The beta is currently available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, but it will be available to the public at some point on 1/9. That includes both the client and the server versions, which means that not only will you be able to play with all of the great work that’s been done in Windows 7 client, but you can also kick the tires on the next version of Hyper-V, which is included with Windows 7 Server (Windows Server 2008 R2).

My team and I have been working super hard on Hyper-V in R2, and we’re really happy to be able to talk about it now. I’ll have more about the new Hyper-V later on, but right now I’ve got some posts lined up that do what this blog was originally started for – to tell you how to run a shiny new beta of Windows in a VM.

I’ll start with Hyper-V, and then move on to Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

These posts are all about VIIrtualization (see what I did there?).

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A New Source For Windows 7 Information

mikekol — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:04:58 GMT

Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan (who’s office is about 5 doors down from mine… I wonder if he can hear me yelling at my test machines) have just started a new blog called Engineering Windows 7.

There isn’t a lot of information over there right now, just a few introductory posts outlining the rules and the purpose of the blog, but I’d imagine that there will be some pretty good information going up on that blog as we approach WinHEC and PDC 2008.

If you’re interested in Windows 7, you should probably add this blog to your RSS aggregator.

Stay tuned here, as well. Once we get some information about Seven out there, I’ll be posting talking about it and how it relates to Virtualization.

Fun times are ahead, everyone.