I've been heads down on all sorts of things, including preparing for two sessions at TechEd next week. If you're heading to New Orleans, be sure to check out these two sessions next week at TechEd in New Orleans covering mixed environments: Code Session Room Day Time ...

I just got a copy of the second edition of our book in the mail (starts shipping next week!) and found out that there’s a Kindle version !  That’s cool!   In case you hadn’t noticed, Microsoft has upgraded our blog platform (lots of changes!).  This is kind of my test post for the updated...

So I’ve been busy the last two week getting ready for TechEd (WAHOO!) where I’m co-presenting two sessions this year.  One of the sessions is all about Linux on Hyper-V.  To get ready, I’ve been working though lots of the common operational tasks including (as you know P2V) migrations. I mentioned...

I’m back from lots of traveling (why I’ve had time to post a few things). I got a great question about my last post…how best to call a custom PowerShell function.  I’m not a PowerShell expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I do use it a good amount and I find it useful to save code that...

I received an e-mail from someone looking for an electronic version of the VMCPU PowerShell reporting script I wrote for our book on Hyper-V, so I thought I would post it here (FYI the updated, 2nd edition is due out in a month or two!). I wrote to script to address CPU performance monitoring requirements...

I mentioned in my last post how challenging manual Physical to Virtual migrations (P2V) of Linux systems can be.  There are a number of great automated tools that make Linux P2V simpler that I’ll try to run through in the coming weeks. The tools I’m showing fill a need – to migrate a Linux host...

I mentioned in a post last week that I would go over some options to perform a Linux Physical to Virtual (P2V) migration on Hyper-V. Before showing you the easy way, I wanted to go over a manual approach that a coworker worked out for me a while back. Even before that, I wanted to review why some common...

Physical to Virtual migration (P2V) is a common task for achieving consolidation goals through virtualization. System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is by far the best tool from Microsoft to facilitate P2V migrations (as well as V2V conversions from VMware to Hyper-V).  The FAQ for SCVMM...

I mentioned in my last post that Microsoft now has multi-processor support for Linux VMs on top of Hyper-V (yeah!). The beta updates to the Linux Integration Services (aka Integration Components / ICs) was big enough new to be picked up by big time Microsoft watchers . There are three enhancements...

I was thinking this week of how to demonstration / highlight the cool new processing capacity of new multi-core processors. I came up with a really short PowerShell script (based on James O’Neill’s Hyper-V management library available on Codeplex ) that creates a specific number of VMs on Hyper-V...

Linux runs on Hyper-V – you’ve seen Hanna Montana Linux here already (I couldn’t resist using it!).  I do hope you’ll look to Windows Server first as your preferred application platform, but realize that sometimes business conditions may lead you to run other operating systems in your data center...

I had this whole post all ready to go, then my lab took a power hit (poof!). At least I know what to write again! Anyhow, I received a great comment on the other “Windows Server Expert” blog about CSV and Live Migration. I had mentioned in a post about the value of Hyper-V backup that CSV is not required...

Happy New Year! I’ve received several questions and comment about backing up VMs that reside on CSV volumes. In short, you can do it, but it’s tricky. There’s a great post on the DPM Insider blog about the challenges ( Here ). Host-based backup of CSV-base VMs works with DPM 2010 and other tools...

I showed you in my last post how to get nearly any OS running on Hyper-V by adding the Legacy Network Adapter (2114X compatible NIC). Yes it works, but the performance isn’t all that great. Microsoft provides Integration Services (also sometimes referred to as Integration Components or ICs) for Linux...

I’ve gotten questions about how I managed to get Hannah Montana Linux (and OpenSolaris and SCO UNIX) to work on Hyper-V. Some folks have tried, but were not able to access network resources (you can clearly see that I was browsing to Bing in the screen shots, but they couldn’t get there!). When you...

In the last few posts I showed you a simple (and low cost ) manual method for back and recovery of virtual machines running on Hyper-V. When I ran through the process in my lab, I purposely used two different types of virtual machines: one Windows VM with a VSS-aware OS and enabled integration...

In my last post I showed you how to create a consistent backup of a Hyper-V host using the no additional cost Diskshadow command and an attached USB drive (in contrast to the costly VMware Consolidated Backup). Now I want to show you how to restore the VMs that you backed up to a separate host (what...

I mentioned in my last post the diskshadow command line tool that was introduced in Windows Server 2008. Jose Barreto did a nice job over viewing the command in his blog , so I won't cover the same ground. I’m going to walk you through how I use diskshadow to create a consistent, restorable, consolidated...

Microsoft introduced the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) as part of Windows Server 2003 . VSS lets you coordinate necessary actions to create a consistent point-in-time copy (also known as a shadow copy or snapshot ) of data for backup purposes. It allows you to create manual or automatic backup snapshots...

I speak with lots of customers about virtualization every week. I’m always interested in how they manage their virtual environment, and often dig into their operational procedures and practices. I find that organizations who adopted virtualization earlier have not taken full advantage of the technology...

I received a comment via e-mail that it can take 2-3 times as long to move a VM from one Hyper-V host to another host, when compared to VMware or Virtual Server. I do not think that the person mentioning this was super familiar with Hyper-V export, but their comment did make a good point about the portability...

A while back I responded to an internal (Microsoft) e-mail where someone had requested information about how to detect if a Windows OS is running on Hyper-V. It was a pretty good note, and Tony Soper posted it for me on his blog back in August of this year ( http://blogs.technet.com/tonyso/archive/2009...

...well, actually, away I went! I published my initial post, and then hit the road traveling for a week and half. I'll get into a better rythm, I promise! Where did this Microsoft guy go? Well duh, I went to the first annual Linux Foundation LinuxCon , of course! No really, I did! It was really...