You know you have had one of those days when you drop your brand new Dell Venue Pro in the parking lot and the unit explodes. The cover comes off, the battery goes flying, and you express your frustration verbally. Then you pick up the pieces and look...

You might have missed the fact that notebook hard drive capacities have increased recently. For those power users that need lots of space, there are a few more options for you. If you are looking for the largest 7200 RPM disk that you can get in the...

I build a lot of scenarios for testing using Hyper-V. During that testing I use snapshots all the time to protect myself from stupid mistakes and failed changes. It is a terrific capability, but can sometimes get you in trouble. In a perfect world, when...

Since Windows 7 RTMd, I figured I needed a new toy to play with. I run Windows Server 2008 R2 on my high end notebook, but wanted to run Windows 7 so I could get some of the great new features. I have been researching netbooks for a few weeks and had...

My Hyper-V Resource Kit co-author, Janique Carbone, and Tim Mueting - AMD Product Manager have gotten together to produce a Q&A on AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology in the latest AMD Opteron processor line. Hyper-V R2 uses this...

Well Janique and I finished another Resource Kit book, this time on Hyper-V…..700 plus pages of Hyper-V resources (including a chapter on Hyper-V R2 coming in Windows Server 2008 R2) is done and on the way to the book store near you! You can find the...

If you are like me, you use Windows Server 2008 R2 as your standard desktop/notebook OS. If you have installed Windows Server 2008 R2 on your notebook, you might notice that you ended up with a series of yellow bangs for missing device drivers. I found...

Well we have finally finished all the chapters of the Hyper-V Resource Kit. We are in final editing stage, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Be looking for it on the shelves within the next 60 days. Here is a preview of the TOC. Introduction...

For you demo warriors out there who try to get the maximum performance for your Hyper-V based demos, eSATA has been your path to maximum performance. If you only use a single drive attached to an eSATA port, you can quit reading, but if you are like me...

Hyper-V automatically creates a MAC address pool for virtual machines usage when it is installed. Hyper-V RTM had no option in the UI for managing the MAC address pool and you had to edit the registry to manage the pool (see a detailed article on that...

When you install Hyper-V R2 role now it reserves a single wired NIC in the machine for management of the parent partition. If you have only a single NIC in your server, you will not be able you select a NIC to create an external network when you are installing...

Ok you are probably wondering why you would ever need Zune software on your Windows Server 2008 x64 machine….well if you are like me, my primary machine is my notebook and I run Windows Server 2008 x64 so I can have Hyper-V. Anyway, Microsoft released...

Some vendors have started shipping DDR2-5300 memory that provides 667Mhz 4GB SODIMMs for you notebook. You will need a notebook that has a SantaRosa chipset to be able to access all 8GB and even then the BIOS has to support it. I personally purchased...

I love Windows Server 2008 installed with Server Core. It’s small footprint (although it could be even smaller), simplistic command line UI, and the boot speed.  One thing I dislike (until recently) is installing updates on Server Core. Well I found...

If you are like me and use Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V on your laptop, you have possibly found out that Hyper-V does not support wireless adapters. This is an issue with the Wireless spec no Hyper-V.  You can use ICS or bridging to get it to...

Snapshots are not the same as UNDO disks in Virtual Server 2005…go here to read a previous post of mine to learn about how they work. That said, you get UNDO like functionality using snapshots…..with maybe a little more work. In Virtual Server, when you...

I create virtual machines every day.  I have a set of product keys that I use from my MSDN subscription and I hate playing the visual copy typing game (ok I am a lousy typist). It turns out that I had overlooked a nice little feature in VMConnect...

Snapshots are a new feature of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Snapshots are a point in time version of a virtual machine…..what does that mean you ask? It means that you can be running a virtual machine, take a snapshot and at any point you can select a...

Well by now you have heard the news that Microsoft shipped Hyper-V Beta 1 early!! Like many of you I have been testing away and thought I would share the steps for creating a host cluster in Windows 2008 and Hyper-V. For those that have built host clusters...

Well I am off to Barcelona Spain again to speak at TechEd IT Forum November 12-16th. This will be an exciting show for Virtualization. System Center products will be launching and Microsoft will be making some announcements about Windows Server 2008 virtualization...

One of the features of VMM that I really like is the power of the Self Service Web Portal (SSWP). The portal provides an individual user or group of users access to a virtual machines that they own or that they create. They can see, manage, and interact...

Microsoft announced today with it will be publishing the Hypercall APIs through the Open Specification Promise when Windows Server Virtualization ships. In addition they posted a draft of these interfaces in the form of a Hypervisor top-level functional...

In Virtual Server 2005 R2, a virtual network operated like a hub with a switched uplink port. Traffic on all guests plugged into the network was visible on every port of the virtual network, but that traffic was not visible to anything on the other side...

My co-author Janique Carbone has posted two new bonus scripts on her site http://vscommunity.com . Both scripts have to do with finding out information about differencing disks. GETVHDParentInfo - Allows you to specify a VHD file on the command line and...

Previously published in the July issue of TechNet Magazine, these are two PDFs of Windows 2008: Operating System components and Active Directory components. The posters explain how they work and detail capabilities. They are great resources to have up...