Virtual PC Guy's WebLog

Windows XP Tablet Edition under Windows Virtual PC

Virtual PC Guy — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:37:47 GMT

Over the weekend I spent some time going through my dusty archives of a virtual machines, bringing them all across to Windows Virtual PC and making sure they were all up to date. One of the virtual machines that I worked on was a Windows XP Tablet Edition virtual machine (which I blogged about back in 2005).

At first I was disappointed to notice that tablet input seemed to have stopped working. But a bit of investigation quickly revealed the problem and the solution. Windows XP Tablet Edition turns off all pen functionality if you connect to it using Remote Desktop – and does the same thing when using Windows Virtual PC with integration features enabled. Disabling integration components restored pen functionality:

(The first picture above shows pen input not working – because integration is enabled, while the second shows it working correctly once integration is disabled).

Now to answer some random questions:

Windows XP Tablet Edition is the only Windows OS that lets you use pen input in a virtual machine. Windows Vista and Windows 7 both check for the presence of a pen input device – which does not exist inside the virtual machine.
Yes, the virtual machine I upgraded over the weekend was the same virtual machine that I created for the blog post back in 2005. Checking the creation date on the virtual machines virtual hard disk file shows that it was created one day before the original blog post.
For the record – the oldest virtual machine in my collection is my OS/2 Warp 4.0 virtual machine – with a creation date from mid 2001. This is closely followed by a NetWare 3.12 virtual machine :-)

Cheers,
Ben

Accessing Shared Drives from the Command Prompt under Windows Virtual PC

Virtual PC Guy — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:37:00 GMT

With Windows Virtual PC we changed our shared folders to be based on the drive sharing code from Remote Desktop. The advantage of this change is that shared drives are now much more stable, reliable and better performing than shared folders ever were. There are some downsides to this change (as I have touched on before).

One of the issues is that shared drives do not get drive letters assigned to them inside the virtual machine with Windows Virtual PC. Which means that while it is easy to use them from the graphical user interface, it can be problematic if you want to access them from the command line.

Luckily there is an easy solution. You can map a shared drive to a drive letter inside the virtual machine by simply running a command like this:

net use j: \\tsclient\c

Where “c” is the drive letter that you are trying to access on the physical computer and “j” is the drive letter that you want to use inside the virtual machine. Once you have done this you can change to the drive letter you just used and run command line operations like you would for any other drive.

Cheers,
Ben

Using Windows Server 2008 Core on Windows Virtual PC

Virtual PC Guy — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:43:42 GMT

First, a caveat. This is not supported. Most of what I am about to talk about is not supported. Feel free to use this information, but do not call Microsoft if it does not work for you.

With that out of the way – this morning I was asked how to get a Windows Server 2008 core installation working on Windows Virtual PC, with integration components. This is possible, and very handy, but is a little tricky to do.

Windows Server 2008 will install onto Windows Virtual PC in a core configuration with no issues. But when you try to install the Integration Components, the installer will fail with the following error message:

The problem is that the installer is trying, and failing, to initialize the sound card driver that is part of the integration components. What you need to do is to disable the sound card in the virtual machine.

You could do this through our handy COM interface, but it is much easier to just go in and hack the virtual machine configuration file. The first thing you will need to do is to turn off the virtual machine (do not hibernate it, you need to turn it off or shut it down). The file you then need to find is the .VMC file for your virtual machine – it will be in the location that you specified when creating the virtual machine:

Open this file in notepad, and locate the section that talks about the sound adapter (it is toward the end):

You need to change the boolean value from “true” to “false” (in the picture above I have already made the necessary change). When you have done this, save the changes to the file, close notepad and start the virtual machine.

Now the Integration Components should install successfully.

Note, when you select to Install Integration Components from the Tools menu, the installer will not start automatically. You will need to manually change to the CD-ROM drive (most likely the E:) and run setup.exe to start the process.

After a reboot you should be able to enable integration features and get integrated mouse and clipboard support.

Cheers,
Ben

Hyper-V ActiveX RDP Control

Virtual PC Guy — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:50:41 GMT

The Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters project have just put up the sample code for a Hyper-V ActiveX RDP control, available here:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ddc/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3833

What this allows you to do is to create a Remote Desktop connection directly to the virtual machine (not to the guest operating system) in exactly the same manner as when you are using the Virtual Machine Connection window in the Hyper-V Management Console.

As this is an ActiveX control you can even use it in a web page if you wish to.

Cheers,
Ben

Windows Server Performance Team: Increase VMBus buffer sizes to increase network throughput to guest VMs

Virtual PC Guy — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:23:42 GMT

The Windows Server Performance team have done a really interesting post on how to optimize network performance inside of virtual machines by increasing the size of the VMBus buffers used by our network adapters. They also do a very good job of explaining the causes and implications of performance issues around virtual networking – so go check it out:

http://blogs.technet.com/winserverperformance/archive/2010/02/02/increase-vmbus-buffer-sizes-to-increase-network-throughput-to-guest-vms.aspx

Cheers,
Ben

Hyper-V VM State to Memory Dump Converter

Virtual PC Guy — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:07:34 GMT

Today Anton – from the Hyper-V development team – released the Hyper-V VM State to Memory Dump Converter tool.

What this tool does is allow you to take the saved state files from a Hyper-V virtual machine and convert it to the memory dump format that is used by the Windows debugging tools. This is very handy if you are a developer who wants to poke around inside the state of a virtual machine – without generating a full memory dump internally (or configuring and connecting a debugger).

You can even use this tool to look at the memory state from a virtual machine snapshot.

You can download the tool (and read more about it) from here:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vm2dmp

Cheers,
Ben

NVSPBind and NVSPScrub

Virtual PC Guy — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:47:58 GMT

Earlier this week, John Howard alerted the world of the availability of “NVSPBind”. This is a handy command line tool that allows you to edit the network protocol bindings on a virtual network adapter (note, it does not work if you are not using virtual networks). This is very useful if you are running Hyper-V Server or Hyper-V on a Windows Server core installation.

You can read more about NVSPBind here on John’s blog, and download it from here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/nvspbind

Though I would like to spend a moment singing the praises of an older tool, NVSPScrub (available here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/nvspscrub).

This tool provides for a quick and easy way to delete all virtual network settings on a system. This can be a real life saver if you have been playing around the the Hyper-V WMI interfaces and have messed up the network configuration on your server.

It has saved me from myself a number of times now.

Cheers,
Ben

Hyper-V virtual machines do not start after using Startup Repair

Virtual PC Guy — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:06:22 GMT

Over the weekend, I attempted to reconfigure some of the drives in my Hyper-V server at home. Note that I said “attempted”. I ran into hardware issues and ended up having to revert back to my old configuration - but somehow in all of this – I broke my system disk.

Specifically it would not boot any more.

This did not phase me because I knew that the excellent startup repair tool in Windows would soon have me up and running – which it did.

But I was surprised to find that when my system did finally boot – none of my virtual machines started up. When I tried to start the virtual machines manually, I was informed that the hypervisor was not running.

After scratching my head for a moment, I realized what had happened. Startup repair had rebuilt my boot configuration data store to get my system up and running. But it did not know that Hyper-V needs to have some specific settings enabled in the boot configuration data store in order to start the hypervisor.

I quickly opened an administrative command prompt and ran the following command:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

After that I rebooted the system and successfully started my virtual machines.

Cheers,
Ben

MED-V Administration Video Series

Virtual PC Guy — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:12:00 GMT

If you have been wondering where I have been, I have been on holiday for the last four weeks, visiting friends and family in sunny Australia. But now I am back in cold, rainy, dark Seattle – so I should have plenty of time to get blogging.

Just before I went off on holiday, the MED-V team put together a helpful set of videos that step through the administration side of using MED-V. Lifting their descriptions from their blog post on this, the following videos are available:

Preparing a MED-V Image - Learn how to prepare a Virtual PC image for use with MED-V.
Testing, Packing, and Uploading a MED-V Image - After completing the preparation, an image will be tested, then packaged, and finally uploaded to the MED-V Server for distribution.
MED-V Workspace Walkthrough - See how to configure a MED-V workspace (policies for the virtual machine) and watch a demonstration of the key features so that you can evaluate and learn the key capabilities of MED-V.
Publishing Different Applications to Different Users of the Same MED-V Image - This demonstration will show you how to use a common MED-V image to serve multiple users or groups while presenting different applications.
Creating a MED-V Installation Package - Deploying MED-V packages can be streamlined by creating an installation package that includes all of the prerequisite technologies (Virtual PC, Virtual Machine Additions update, and MED-V client) as well as a MED-V Workspace.
MED-V First Time Setup with Domain Join - Taking workspace images and configuring them to join the organization Active Directory domain is a critical part of managing, controlling and updating the virtual machines deployed, and is easy with MED-V first time setup.
Monitoring and Troubleshooting Tools in MED-V - Having the right tools to gain status, detect errors, and analyze problems is important when planning a MED-V infrastructure.
Updating a MED-V Image - MED-V workspaces will require updates as any other machine on the network, this walkthrough of updating the master image and distributing to users can be used if machines are not joined to the domain and managed by typical system management tools.

You can download any one (or all) of these videos from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1f0d3e54-25d1-4ec1-a844-3b508bd63ffa

Cheers,
Ben

RemoteApp + Hyper-V + Windows XP / Vista

Virtual PC Guy — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:15:12 GMT

The Remote Desktop team just did an interesting post here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/2009/12/15/remoteapp-for-hyper-v.aspx

About the RemoteApp for Hyper-V functionality that is available with Windows Server 2008 R2.

The concept here is that you would have a setup similar to Windows Virtual PC, where you run a legacy application in a Windows XP / Vista virtual machine, and access it seamlessly from your desktop. Only in this case the virtual machine is not running on your desktop – but on a Hyper-V server.

This looks really neat - and I am hoping to get the time to try it out in the next week or two.

Cheers,
Ben

The different ways to compact a disk

Virtual PC Guy — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:08:52 GMT

Today if you want to compact a virtual hard disk – you can use Virtual PC / Virtual Server / Hyper-V or Windows 7. But not all methods are the same. Under the covers there are two different approaches that are taken to compacting virtual hard disks:

Virtual PC / Virtual Server:

Perform a blind “block level” compaction. Here the virtual hard disk is inspected at a block level, and when a block is found which is full of zeroes, the block is removed from the virtual hard disk.

More accurately, zeroed blocks are not copied. Because when you compact a virtual hard disk with Virtual PC / Virtual Server – they do so by creating a new blank virtual hard disk and copying the data across – and then deleting the original virtual hard disk at the end.

Advantages:

Works with any file system inside the virtual hard disk.
Can compact differencing virtual hard disks (Windows Virtual PC only).

Disadvantages:

Requires that you run a pre-compaction tool that writes zeroes to unused space in the virtual hard disk.
May work better if you run a defragmentation program inside the virtual machine first.
Requires that you have enough free space on the physical disk for a second copy of the virtual hard disk.
Has to process all the data in the virtual hard disk – so can take a while.

Hyper-V / Windows 7:

Hyper-V and Windows 7 use a different approach to compacting virtual hard disks. What they do is look for an NTFS file system on the virtual hard disk. If they find one, they read this data directly and use it to identify zeroed blocks that can be removed from the virtual hard disk.

This operation is done “in place” which means that no second virtual hard disk is created.

Advantages:

No preparation needed - just point it at an offline virtual hard disk and it works.
No need for extra free space on the physical disk.
Faster than Virtual PC / Virtual Server.

Disadvantages:

Does not work with non-NTFS formatted virtual hard disks.

Cheers,
Ben

Core Configurator 2.0 now available!

Virtual PC Guy — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 07:50:00 GMT

Core Configurator 2.0 is now available for download here: http://coreconfig.codeplex.com/

If you are unfamiliar with this tool – it is a graphical tool that allows you to configure a whole bunch of system settings on a Windows Server Core installation:

Having spent some time playing with this release I have been impressed by a number of features:

The entire tool is just a bunch of PowerShell Scripts. Truly amazing stuff. I just spent half an hour pouring over the code in these scripts to see how they are able to do half the things they manage to do.
If you have not enabled PowerShell on your core server – the launch script will offer to do so automatically. So it is very easy to get up and running.
Along with all the usual server core configuration stuff - this release has basic support for Hyper-V which allows you to list virtual machines, start and stop virtual machines, and view the thumbnail of running virtual machines.
If you are planning to use this to setup server core inside a virtual machine – you can also download the tool on a .ISO file – which lets you easily connect it to your virtual machine of choice.

Cheers,
Ben

Why Hyper-V cannot boot off of SCSI disks (and why you should not care)

Virtual PC Guy — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:58:24 GMT

Under Hyper-V we have two kinds of disk controller that you can add to a virtual machine – IDE disks and SCSI disks. A rough list of the differences between these controllers is as follows:

IDE:

Works on operating systems without integration services installed / available
Can be used to boot a virtual machine

SCSI:

Supports hot add / remove of virtual hard disks

The type of disk controller that you use in the virtual machine has nothing to do with the type of disk that you are using in your physical computer. SCSI VHDs can be stored on IDE disks, and IDE VHDs can be stored on SCSI disks.

Why can’t you boot Hyper-V virtual machines off of SCSI disks?

Well, calling our SCSI controller “SCSI” is somewhat of a misnomer.

When we were working on Virtual Server we heard, loud and clear, that servers had SCSI disks – so virtual servers needed to have virtual SCSI disks. To this end we invested in the emulation of an Adaptec SCSI controller for Virtual Server. Unfortunately, this SCSI controller is a very advanced piece of hardware – and as a result was actually slower to emulate than the more simplistic IDE controller that we were already emulating.

In the end we had to extend our emulated Adaptec controller and write custom drivers for our supported operating systems in order to get good performance for SCSI in a virtual machine.

With Hyper-V we dropped the emulation of an Adaptec controller altogether. Instead we implemented our traditional emulated IDE controller and a new completely virtual, VMBUS based, storage controller - with no traces of emulation present.

It is this virtual storage controller that you are adding to a virtual machine when you choose to add a SCSI controller to a virtual machine.

The problem is that the BIOS that is used by our virtual machine has no knowledge of VMBUS and is only able to boot to emulated devices. This is why you can boot to an IDE controller and a legacy network adapter – but not to a SCSI controller or network adapter.

Why you should not care about not being able to boot off of SCSI disks in Hyper-V.

When talking to users about needing to boot off of SCSI disks in a virtual machine – there were two reasons that came up.

The first one was that SCSI could support larger virtual hard disks than IDE could. To address this we made the IDE controller in Hyper-V use 48-bit LBA. This allows you to attach virtual hard disks that are up to 2TB in size to an IDE controller.

The second reason was performance. But that too is not an issue.

Let me start by grabbing an architectural diagram I have on file (you can tell that this is an old diagram because it uses our codename – Viridian – which means it was originally drawn before we had been given “Hyper-V” as our name). Now, the parent partition diagram is not 100% correct for Windows Server 2008 R2 – but the child partition diagram is accurate for both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and that is where I want to focus.

The first thing to notice in the child partition side of things is the “Virtual Storage Minport (VSC)”. The is essentially the driver that gets loaded when you attach a SCSI controller to a virtual machine. It connects to VMBUS and allows us to perform Disk I/O without any emulation involved in a very high performance manner.

The next thing to notice is the “Fast Path Filter”. This is a filter driver that gets installed on all disk objects in the virtual machine – whether they are IDE or SCSI. It allows us to pass directly to the VMBUS based path for everything except low level disk operations (like partitioning a disk).

What this means is that once the integration services are installed the same code path is used for disk I/O whether you use an IDE disk or a SCSI disk. There are two limitations that remain for IDE disks:

Disk commands to IDE disks on the same controller are serialized by the guest operating system (note that you can only have two IDE disks on a single controller)
The IDE disk is limited to I/O block sizes of 512kb or less – while the SCSI controller can go up to block sizes of 8mb

However I have yet to see a test where either of these limitations resulted in a noticeable performance difference between IDE and SCSI.

Cheers,
Ben

Updated Hyper-V Monitor Gadget Now Available

Virtual PC Guy — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:34:21 GMT

Tore Lervik has released an updated version of his fantastic Hyper-V Monitor Gadget. New features in this release include:

Neat little CPU graph for running virtual machines
Option to use Remote Desktop to connect to running virtual machines
Support for turning on / shutting down a remote Hyper-V server using Wake-On-LAN

If you have not tried this tool out, you should go and grab a copy from here: http://mindre.net/post/Hyper-V-Monitor-Gadget-for-Windows-Sidebar.aspx

Cheers,
Ben

Hyper-V and Domain Controllers – Demo Tips and Tricks

Virtual PC Guy — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:42:00 GMT

In the past I have talked about the different configuration options when running Domain Controllers and Hyper-V. One of the more interesting configurations I discussed then was having a Hyper-V server joined to a domain where the domain controller was a virtual machine running on the same instance of Hyper-V.

This is actually a configuration I use all of the time when I am doing public demonstrations. The reason why I do this is because:

I do not like to ship hardware – as I have had hardware get damaged in shipping too many times.
I do not trust networking in a demo environment – so if I can keep it all on one computer, I will.
I often have to demonstrate software / configurations that need a domain controller.

This all means that I need to have a domain controller in a virtual machine on my laptop.

Over the course of many demos – I have gleaned a few interesting tips and tricks for this sort of configuration.

One of the biggest differences (for me) about doing this on my laptop, is that I need to system to be able to boot quickly and reliably. Often when speaking publicly – I only get to take the stage about 10 minutes prior to speaking. I need to be able to boot my whole system and be confident that my demo is going to work in under 10 minutes.

Sometimes I also need to run my PowerPoint presentation on the same laptop – so make that 8 minutes to “up and running”.

Tip #1 – Disable the use of cached credentials

Normally, if you have a computer joined to a domain and you try to login when no connection to the domain controller is present- you will be able to log in successfully. The reason why this works is because Windows allows you to use a locally cached copy of your domain credentials.

Unfortunately – this can be a problem in a demo environment. Imagine this scenario:

You have your demo all setup and ready to go, you pack up your laptop and head out to where you are going to be presenting. Once there you boot your laptop, login, and start the presentation. 20 minutes in – it is time for your demo. You switch from PowerPoint and start to do the demo – only to find that none of your server virtual machines are authenticating with each other! After a few minutes of nervous muttering – you realize that the domain controller never started. By this time – your demo is pretty much ruined and you have to abandon the whole thing.

Yup, I have had this happen to me. That is why I like to disable the use of cached credentials. This way I am immediately alerted of problems with my domain environment – and know that if I was able to login – then everything is fine. Of course, if you are going to do this you need to be extra careful to have a local administrator account ready to go if there is a problem to fix.

You can disabled the use of cached credentials by going to the client computer (your physical computer / management operating system in this case), opening REGEDIT.EXE and locating this registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. Then you want to find the entry called cachedlogonscount and change it to 0.

Tip #2 – Avoid huge delays by fixing the DNS up when the Domain Controller Starts

I have wrestled with this one for a while, as I know many of you have. When you restart your domain controller it seems to take *for ever* before it will let you authenticate from a remote computer. I timed my standard demo environment (without the change that I am about to discuss) and it would often take longer than 10 minutes from system boot to being able to login to the domain. Clearly this is a big issue for me when I am up on stage and trying to get my demo up and running quickly. But I have also been frustrated by this is my home server setup as well. After a bit of digging – I discovered that the cause of this delay is because the domain controller is not registered correctly with the domain name services server (DNS). As I have a small setup I usually create a single virtual machine that contains the domain controller, DNS server and DHCP server.

In this configuration – the DNS server comes up after the domain controller – and does not have the registration information from the domain controller. When a domain controller fails to register itself with a DNS server, two things happen:

No one is able to find the domain controller
The domain controller waits about 10 minutes before trying to re-register itself with the DNS server

So the trick is to try and get re-registration to happen quicker.

The way I do this is by creating a batch file (which I call “FixDNS.CMD”) the contents of this batch file is as follows:

ipconfig /flushdnsipconfig /registerdnsnltest /dsregdns

The “ipconfig” commands ensure that all is correct with the DNS settings and the “nltest” command does the work to register the domain controller with the DNS server.

I then use task scheduler to run this batch file “At system startup”. I have it configured to run without needing a user to log in, and have it run as a domain administrator account:

The result of these changes is that my laptop is able to boot and login to the domain controller in under 4 minutes. Handy!

Well, that is it for today. Hopefully these tips and tricks will help you out some day.

Cheers,
Ben