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Hyper-V and Power Management

When you enable the Hyper-V role on Windows Server 2008 support for sleep / hibernate will be disabled.  The reason for this is that supporting these features on a hypervisor based system is incredibly complicated - and Hyper-V is designed to run on servers - where sleep and hibernate are not used.

To answer some common questions:

  1. What about other aspects of power management?

    Other power management methods (changing processor speed, entering low power states, etc...) are still functional with Hyper-V is enabled.

  2. Is there some way that I can "hack" the system to re-enable sleep / hibernate with Hyper-V?

    No.

  3. But I want to run Hyper-V on my laptop!

    Good for you.  I run Hyper-V on a tablet myself (with 320GB 7200 RPM disks and 4GB ram).  But you will either need to live without sleep / hibernate - or dual boot your system (I actually triple boot my tablet).

Cheers,
Ben

Published Wednesday, February 27, 2008 10:20 PM by Virtual PC Guy
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Comments

# re: Hyper-V and Power Management

"The reason for this is that supporting these features on a hypervisor based system is incredibly complicated"

That is very easy to believe.  You should have said just that.

"and Hyper-V is designed to run on servers - where sleep and hibernate are not used."

That depends entirely on what the server is being used for.  When I used to have time to run Visual Studio at home I preferred running it on Server 2003 rather than XP.  I still hibernate my Server 2003 system.  A few years ago when an employer used to shut down some of its 2000 servers every night, I used to wish I could hibernate them instead of shutting them down.

I'm still experimenting with several possibilities on my latest notebook.  Thank you for the information that I won't want to run a Hyper-V configuration on a daily basis.

Thursday, February 28, 2008 1:50 AM by Norman Diamond

# re: Hyper-V and Power Management

Norman,

I wouldn't discount Hyper-V for lack of hibernate on the host. Although with you lose the fast start-up benefit of hibernate, if you run all your apps inside a guest instead of the host, you can have it save state automatically when you shut down, so you can start off exactly where you were when you start up again. If you keep the host clean, it will still start up quickly.

cheers,

Aitor

Thursday, February 28, 2008 5:38 AM by Aitor Ibarra

# re: Hyper-V and Power Management

"if you run all your apps inside a guest instead of the host, you can have it save state"

Good point, thank you.  I've done that for apps that I'm testing but forgot that it could be done for ordinary apps in daily use.

"If you keep the host clean, it will still start up quickly."

You have a point there too, but I wonder if it's practical.  In XP's case that would mean things like don't install .Net framework on the host  ^_^

Thursday, February 28, 2008 7:40 PM by Norman Diamond

# re: Hyper-V and Power Management

I don't think Hyper-V and Sleep/Hibernate is related at all.

I didn't lost Sleep/Hibernate with VMWare Server! Why dont microsoft cannot code hyper-v to allow sleep/hibernate? Why don't they just suspend the VM temporarily and allow sleep/hibernate...???

I'm removing Hyper-V and regret that i invest so much time and effort setting up Windows 2008 on my laptop :S

...will try VMWare Server instead.

Friday, March 07, 2008 7:41 AM by nantcom

# re: Hyper-V and Power Management

Hi Nantcom -

VMware Server is a hosted virtualization solution - just like Virtual Server.  That architecture makes supporting things like sleep / hibernate much easier.

Cheers,

Ben

Friday, March 07, 2008 12:53 PM by Virtual PC Guy

# re: Hyper-V and Power Management

Ben, I have been looking for a good tablet on which to run Hyper-V. What is the make/model of your tablet? And by the way, what 3 OSes are you booting into? I'm asking because have weird issues dual-booting with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista.

Sunday, March 09, 2008 4:47 AM by JC Mackin

# re: Hyper-V and Power Management

I have a non Hyper-V related question and I hope some of you can help me address.

I have a Windows Server 2008 box that doesn't have Hyper-V installed (however the setup CD is the one with Hyper-V). I does see Sleep in power options, but under it there's only "Hibernate after *** minutes" and no "Sleep after *** minutes". Also I can't put the server to sleep / hibernation using the start menu. Is there anyway I can fix this? Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Jim

Saturday, March 15, 2008 2:51 PM by Jim Liu

# re: Hyper-V and Power Management

I'd like to think that nothing is too hard for the great developers at Microsoft :-)

So PLEASE make this an improvement for vNext!

As a developer coding for Active Directory / DNS / IIS7 etc... I really want to use a 2008 server with Hyper-V as my dev workstation.

Now I have my pc running 24/7, so if Microsoft cares about the environment and global warming, you'd better enable sleep/hibernate in SP1 ;)

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 12:43 AM by dotnetjunkie

# re: Hyper-V and Power Management

This REALLY needs to be in there.  You're targeting developers for this release, and a lot of them use laptops.  I tried running for a few days without sleep and loved Hyper-V, but cannot use my laptop like that - so had to remove it again.  I'm actively looking for an alternative solution.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 9:14 AM by Alex S.
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