Virtual PC Guy's Blog

-- Ben Armstrong, Virtualization Program Manager

Talking about core virtualization at Microsoft (Hyper-V, Virtual PC and Virtual Server).
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Wednesday, October 07, 2009 3:28 PM

Disk2vhd v1.0 now available

The SysInternals team just announced the availability of a new tool: Disk2vhd . This is a tool that you run on a running Windows computer to create virtual hard disks copies of the physical disks that are attached.  Under the covers this tool works
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 24 Comments
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 5:49 PM

Searching my blog finally works properly!

After years of lackluster search capabilities on my blog – the blogs.msdn.com people have finally moved from the built in search engine of our blogging platform to using bing.  Hoo rah!  You can finally use the search box and get good results.
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 1 Comments
Monday, September 28, 2009 11:25 AM

SCOM Management Pack for Windows Server 2008 R2

The System Center Operations Manager management pack for Windows Server 2008 R2 is now available.  In fact it has been available for a while now (since 9/18).  Unfortunately I missed this because this was delivered as an update to the existing
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 0 Comments
Monday, September 21, 2009 3:56 PM

Processor Affinity and why you don’t need it on Hyper-V

I have just got back from spending a lot of time on the road, and in my time talking to various users, I ran into a question that I have heard a number of times: “Can I allocate a specific processor for use by a single virtual machine” And my answer is
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 8 Comments
Sunday, September 13, 2009 2:42 PM

Virtual PC 2007 SP1 Update

Okay, I missed this one when it came out.  In my defense – this was released in February, when I was heads down working on Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 stuff.  There is an update for Virtual PC 2007 SP1 that has some significant improvements,
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 11 Comments
Monday, August 31, 2009 11:25 PM

How I became “Virtual PC Guy”

I have been meaning to blog about this for a long time now, and since I seem to be writing a number of insufferably long blog posts lately, I figured there was no better time than the present. Most of you know me as someone who has been working on Microsoft
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 14 Comments
Wednesday, August 26, 2009 12:36 AM

What’s up with all the angst / mud slinging?

Over the last couple of months, there has been a rise in discussion between Microsoft and VMware online. While both sides certainly have many moderate bloggers who are conducting civil and constructive conversations, both sides are also guilty of getting
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 17 Comments
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 11:11 AM

I am speaking at Tech-Ed Australia and Tech-Ed New Zealand

Immediately after attending VMworld this year I am going to be jumping on a plane and heading back home to speak at Tech-Ed Australia and Tech-Ed New Zealand . At both of these shows I am going to be giving two presentations: Windows 7 XP Compatability
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 3 Comments
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 1:15 AM

Geeking out with Windows Deployment Services

(Stick with me on this one – it will take a while but I will bring this back to virtualization at the end of it all.  Oh – and be warned – this is a very long post.) This weekend I had a challenge to solve: A while ago I bought myself one of the
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 5 Comments
Monday, April 27, 2009 9:34 AM

Windows Virtual PC is Coming…

Over on the Windows Blog, Scott Woodgate has given us a brief glance of Windows Virtual PC, which will be part of Windows 7.  One of the most exciting features is the new “Windows XP mode” which is designed to help people with Windows XP applications
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 33 Comments
Thursday, April 23, 2009 9:52 PM

Should virtual machine snapshots be used in production? [Hyper-V]

With all of the information that I have been talking about around snapshotting – one conversation that I have often is whether people should use virtual machine snapshots in production environments (note that this is virtual machine snapshotting I am
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 1 Comments
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 8:45 PM

Why is my virtual machine "Paused-Critical"? [Hyper-V]

Virtual machines will go into the “Paused-Critical” state under Hyper-V if we detect that we are going to run out of space for the virtual hard disks.  If we were to run out of space for expanding a dynamic or differencing virtual hard disk – we
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 0 Comments
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 8:37 PM

What happens if I start a virtual machine that is merging snapshot files? [Hyper-V]

If you have a virtual machine with snapshots that have been deleted, it might decide to start merging in the snapshot AVHD files the next time the virtual machine turns off.  But what if you were only planning to turn off the virtual machine for
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 2 Comments
Monday, April 20, 2009 8:31 PM

Why does it take so long to delete a virtual machine with snapshots? [Hyper-V]

You may have noticed that if you try to delete a virtual machine with snapshots associated with it – it can take quite a long time for the virtual machine to complete deleting.  The reason for this is that we are “cleaning up” the snapshot files
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 2 Comments
Thursday, April 16, 2009 3:21 PM

What happens when a snapshot is being merged? [Hyper-V]

I would like to now take a little side road to look at what happens under the covers when you delete a snapshot and we need to merge the AVHD.  Imagine that you have a virtual machine with the following snapshots: If you were to delete Snapshot 2,
Posted by Virtual PC Guy | 0 Comments
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