My company laptop dual-boots between Windows 7 x64 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This is for the simple reason that Hyper-V is an indispensible tool for a consultant, but the comfort of a desktop OS like Windows 7 means that I don't want to do without either operating system. I keep the R2 installation...

I know posts here have been sparse recently but I haven't neglected the blog, honest! Firstly, I was in the Canary Islands for a week’s holiday and since then I have been swamped with preparation work for the upcoming release of Windows 7. Consequently, I will have some great Windows 7 topics to blog...

A new book has gone to press recently covering Hyper-V.  The “Insider’s Guide to Microsoft's Hypervisor” covers pretty much everything you need to know about Hyper-V, as well as recommendations on how to install, configure, and secure virtual machines.  It also covers the ever more important...

I recently noticed a blog post on TechNet about a new tool that was released on CodePlex.  WIM2VHD is a command-line tool allows you to create sysprepped VHD images from any Windows 7 installation source (and I suspect Windows Server 2008 R2 as well) that work with Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Microsoft...

Want to try out Windows Server 2008? Or perhaps Exchange Server 2007? You can download complete virtual machine environments for a whole list of Microsoft products, free of charge. Check out the Test Drive program here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb738372.aspx for more information and the download...

Having better ‘green credentials’ than your competitor seems to be the in thing at the moment. You’ll often see a company saying that they will plant X number of trees for each purchase you make, etc. Of course, this is always a good thing and anything that is done, no matter how small, to improve the...

I saw an interesting article this morning regarding how Hyper-V is doing in the virtualization arena.  It was written by IDC, an independent think-tank who has no ties to Microsoft - so hopefully that should stop most people from claiming that the article is nothing more than marketing propaganda...

HTAMount is a HTML application that I wrote a while ago that provides a no-nonsense interface allowing you to mount/unmount offline Hyper-V virtual disk images (VHD) to your local file system, in read-only mode. It consists of a HTML Application (HTA) front-end with some VBS script doing the mount/unmounting...

I blogged a few months ago about how activating Hyper-V on a laptop that is running Windows Server 2008 will disable all hibernation and sleep functionality. It seems that most people had not known this because I got quite a few comments on the post about it. The comments varied from simple complaints...

Warning, this post may offend some of the diehard VMWare fans, especially my brother... I have refrained from blogging about the Hyper-V RTM release a few weeks ago, simply because of the fact that almost every Microsoft employee has already posted something about it on their blog. I have been waiting...

My work laptop runs Windows Server 2008 for one main reason, Hyper-V. I have a 64 bit CPU with 4 Gb of RAM installed, so it seemed the obvious choice to install it! Everything runs very well, especially my virtual machines which as an Infrastructure consultant I could not live without. However, one thing...

A colleague of mine sent me this image, and I just could not resist posting it in my blog.  I won't comment any further on it as I know from experience that some people don't like hearing bad things about VMWare.  I'll just say that this is a graph of VMWare's share price before and after the...

I noticed today that someone has written a new cool gadget for the Windows Sidebar that lets you display what multiple Hyper-V servers are doing, all from your workstation. Double clicking on a server will also allow you to connect straight to it. You can get the gadget, and more info about it...

This week I installed a new Windows Vista virtual machine in Hyper-V.  I installed the OS, added it to the domain, then realised that I had not added the integration services for the guest OS.  Launching the install for them gave me the following error message which I had not seen before. As...

I am in Seattle at the moment at an internal Microsoft conference.  Yesterday I attended a presentation by one of the product managers for Hyper-V where he really stressed a point that people ask me all the time, he also explained to everyone the reasoning behind the decisions made.  The 'issue...

I am sure that this has been blogged about at least a trillion times, so I am going to make it a trillion and 1. I have been running Windows Server 2008 64bit Enterprise Edition RTM on my company laptop (a 64bit dual core with 4GB of RAM) for about a week now and I think that it is fantastic; my single...