The Self-Service Portal is a web application provided as part of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and allows “non admin” users to be able to work with specific VMs, and possibly even have the right to deploy new ones. Being a web application, the interface is accessed via a browser – the opening...

Before I start, a note on “differencing disks”… these are .AVHD files which contain a list of the changed sectors when compared with a parent VHD, and their data, and they are always dynamic. Without its parent, a differencing disk is useless – they can be considered similar to a “differential backup...

Update to my blog entry from March 30th , there is now a public KB article describing the issue. Exactly the same information (I did the tech review), but it’s a more “official” article.

The Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, other than being a mouthful to say and hence referred to as SCVMM, is a great consolidation tool for managing Virtual Server, Hyper-V and even VMWare ESX hosts and the VMs on them. This isn’t a sales blog, so if you’re not already familiar with the...

Occasionally the purpose of snapshotting VMs in Hyper-V is misunderstood (and hence misused), and people find that their initial guesstimate as to required disk space was insufficient, so try to extend it after the fact. If there was an eleventh commandment, it should possibly be “ Thou shalt not expand...

vm2dmp is a newly released tool to create a complete memory dump of a Hyper-V virtual machine: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vm2dmp Along with the Debugging Tools for Windows , it can be used to view the valid memory pages of a virtual machine’s snapshot state or saved state. Very useful if you have...

Recently we came across a case where Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 servers running under Hyper-V were all failing to start one of the (five) Integration Services offered by the host. The services created by the Integration Services are: Hyper-V Data Exchange Service Hyper-V Guest Shutdown...

The most common questions that I get on Hyper-V setups relates to the networking configuration, and it seems to be common thing to get wrong, so I’ll try to go through the 3 types of virtual network we have, and how they differ.   A private network can only be used by the child partitions, so consider...

After doing an in-place upgrade of my Windows Server 2008 SP2 Hyper-V host to bring it up to Windows Server 2008 R2, I decided to have a bash at setting up the Hyper-V management tools on my Windows 7 client. My setup is as follows: w2k8 - Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 - Standalone server - Hyper-V role...

On the What's New in Windows Server 2008 R2? page you can see one of the improvements for Hyper-V has been improved virtual networking performance, and specifically “offloading” has been extended through to the child partitions for those physical NICs that offer it. I did an in-place upgrade of my home...

Before I begin: this section is not related to Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Hyper-V, App-V or any 3rd party virtualization product. On Windows XP a process running as a regular user that attempts to write to %systemroot% (due to assumptions made by the programmer) would most likely crash, or at least...