Browse by Tags

IT Pros have long asked for a “change log” on technical information from Microsoft. For example, the Vi rtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Guide to Operations Manager Integration shows this right up font: For decades now inside Microsoft TOC has stood for Table of Contents. In this new age of “good enough...

Released today for free-as-in-beer on MSDN Code Gallery: Microsoft Hyper-V VM State to Memory Dump Converter Check out this great troubleshooting tool. Did I mention it is free?

Customers often ask “Given a hardware load-out X, how many Ys can I get/run/host?” The frustrating answer always starts with “…it depends…”. We caveat this way not because we want to frustrate, but because it is true. Many teams will go on to say “We have tested the following in our labs and gotten the...

The good folks at Codeplex, the folks who bring you the free-as-in-beer Hyper-V PowerShell SnapIn also bring you the PowerShell PowerBoots . “ PowerBoots makes it easier for scripters to create graphical user interfaces in PowerShell, exposing much of the power of WPF to PowerShell in a simple syntax...

Ben’s blog post lays out all the background and details on import/export of VMs in Windows Server 2008 R2 . Soumya’s blog post gives a couple of scripts showing how to do a config-only export,a nd a script for importing it.

John shares how to hack your 12V drill to power you Zune speakers . He also tells How to Detect The Virtualization Layer From Within A Guest .

Microsoft IT General Manager Jim Dubois shares info about virtualization inside Microsoft in this short (4 minute) video.

Check out the newly released PowerShell cmdlet reference material at: Getting Started Guide for IT Pros Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) Failover Clustering Group Policy Active Directory Active Directory Rights Management Services AppLocker Power Shell Administration Guide for Active Directory . Next up...

Need to convert a running computer to a .VHD? Use Disk2Vhd , released yesterday. Disk2vhd is a free-as-in-beer Sysinternals utility you can use to create VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks. You can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. “Disk2vhd...

Recently a customer asked how to find and subscribe to a list of patches and hotfixes for Hyper-V. You can find them here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd430893.aspx To subscribe to the RSS Feed for comments on this page (new patches are listed in comments before they are updated on the...

The Windows Server Virtualization guide 2.0, a.k.a. the IPD guide for Windows Server Virtualization (updated for Windows Server 2008 R2) has been re-released with updates to include Windows Server 2008 R2. “The reader is guided through the nine-step process of designing components, layout, and connectivity...

You don’t. Chances are you found this blog post by searching for some combination of the words in the bag “set processor affinity Hyper-V”. As Ben explains in his blog post: Processor Affinity and why you don’t need it on Hyper-V , there is no way to set VM processor affinity in Hyper-V. Instead, you...

The download for the Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack for Windows Server 2008 (and 2003) is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3529d233-5e3e-4b51-8f66-5d6f27005ec3 NOTE: System Requirements Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000 Server;...

A colleague recently shared some good advice for managing  MAC address conflicts on your VMs: Best Practice = Prevent. There is a standard for MAC addressing whereby OEMs get prefixes (i.e. the first couple pairs of the MAC address range) registered to them. The help file in VMM R2 for " How...

The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2020 (MDT) is live. Enjoy. MDT helps you automate desktop and server deploymens, including: Unified tools, processes and guidance for desktop and server deployment Fully automated Zero Touch Installation deployments by leveraging System Center Configuration Manager 2007...

Resources from our friends in customer support that will help you as you begin your design of failover clusters for Hyper-V: Quorum: Guide: Configuring the Quorum in a Failover Cluster Multi-site Clusters TechNet Webcast: Geographically Dispersed Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008...

Jon Brodkin on Network World reports some bumps in the road at VMworld 2009 in his article VMworld 2009: Virtualization, controversy and eating your own dog food. “ …the data center didn't work as well as intended, with attendees reporting continuous technological problems during a vSphere boot camp...

Some good virtualization videos on the web for your Labor-day viewing. TN Edge Videos : 5 pages, lots of good stuff MSN.COM Hyper-V Videos: · Hyper-V Architecture Demonstration · Getting to Know Hyper-V · Introduction to server virtualization · Hyper-V Part 1 - The Architecture 1/2 · Windows Server 2008...

Shortly after TR9 I had the opportunity to talk with STB President Bob Muglia about Virtualization. Click the picture to open this 5 minute audio podcast from my public Skydrive ( TR9 – Bob Muglia ).  Includes Bob’s thoughts about customer advantages of Microsoft’s virtualization solutions, including...

In this 5 minute video Windows Server Technical Writer Felipe Ayora demonstrates how to change the BIOS settings on your computer to make the hypervisor run. NOTE: remember to completely power off your computer after making the changes to the BIOS. Some computers will not take the changes unless they...

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=292de23c-845c-4d08-8d65-b4b8cbc8397b Team Blog http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2009/08/24/system-center-virtual-machine-manager-vmm-2008-r2-rtms.aspx

Some friends here on the Hyper-V team shared a PowerShell 2.0 script for checking the integration services/integration components to see if they are current in your VMs: # Test if the IC version is up to date param( [string]$vmName = $(throw "Must specify virtual machine name") ) $vm = gwmi...

Some friends here on the Hyper-V team shared a PowerShell 2.0 script for checking in the hypervisor is running on a Hyper-V server (host/parent partition): # Check if Hypervisor is running $hypervisor = gwmi –ErrorAction SilentlyContinue Win32_PerfRawData_HvStats_HyperVHypervisor return $hypervisor...

Some friends here on the Hyper-V team shared a PowerShell 2.0 script for taking a snapshot of your VMs: # Take a snapshot of a VM param( [string]$vmName = $(throw "Must specify virtual machine name") ) # Get the virtual machine by name $vm = gwmi -namespace root\virtualization Msvm_ComputerSystem...

Some friends here on the Hyper-V team shared a PowerShell 2.0 script for shutting down your VMs: # Shutdown a Virtual Machine (requires Integration Components) param( [string]$vmName = $(throw "Must specify virtual machine name") ) # Get the VM by name and request state to change to Enabled...