Confessions of a Microsoft Consultant : Hyper-V

Yes, I am still alive...!

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

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 about, as well as plenty of other things.

In the meantime, you can check out some of the shoddy marketing attempts that VMWare is using to try and discredit Hyper-V R2. Frankly, for a billion dollar company like VMWare, they should be able to do better than this. Anyway, the responses from Jeff Woolsey (Microsoft) should help to dispel some of the baseless fud that my anti-Microsoft VMware-obsessed brother has had drilled into him by his VMWare sales rep.

Get the full story here: http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/09/hyper-v-winning-daily-vmware-fud-reaching-new-heights.aspx

If this is the best that VMWare can do, and if this is their latest hard thought out Hyper-V killer strategy then they are clearly worried about what Hyper-V R2 will do to their marketshare.

Stay tuned...

Getting inside information about Hyper-V

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:07:01 GMT

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 topic of how Hyper–V can be used to reduce cost and eliminate the complexity of a server infrastructure by consolidating workloads. And, of course, Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager are covered in detail.

As it is written by Microsoft people, I won’t bang on about how great it is, go read the reviews on Amazon to get the public’s opinion. You can buy it from Amazon.co.uk here.

If only I could get my VMWare-loving/obsessed brother to read it. Perhaps he’d open his eyes a little…

Faster Creation of Virtual Machines

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:55:49 GMT

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 Hyper-V, and Windows 7's new Native VHD-Boot functionality. Basically, you can create an entire virtual machine VHD file in minutes without have to go through the whole setup process of Windows. It is nice and simple to use, and after a brief moment of confusion I had it working fine :-)

To create my first VHD file, I ran the command: cscript.exe C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\WIM2VHD.wsf /wim:e:\sources\install.wim /sku:Ultimate /vhd:U:\Hyper-V\Win7.vhd /size:12000 /disktype:Dynamic

However, this failed (as shown below) with the error “Error: 0: No filePath was specified”. After fiddling around with the command line to make sure that I was specifying the relevant paths, I realised that WIM2VHD was failing because it was unable to mount the WIM file from the Windows 7 DVD.

In order to mount WIM files, you first need to have installed the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), which you can get here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4AD85860-D1F4-42A1-A46C-E039E3D0DB5D&displaylang=en. One thing to note is that I installed the beta version that was released for Windows 7. I do not actually know if the current 1.1 version will work with WIM2VHD, I imagine so. The 1.1 version can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=94BB6E34-D890-4932-81A5-5B50C657DE08&displaylang=en

Once that was installed, I simply re-ran the previous command and, as you can see, had much more success!

This really is a great tool, as you can create virtual machines extremely quickly. And, the possibilities are endless because you could incorporate WIM2VHD into existing processes so that you could provision new computers easily and quickly on-the-fly using scripts.

Kicking the tyres

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:44:00 GMT

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 links.

The best thing about it is that you can download an entire virtual machine with the software pre-configured and running correctly – so you don’t need to complete any additional tasks in order to start playing/testing/evaluating the products immediately in your own virtual environment.

Enjoy!

Project Highlander

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:28:00 GMT

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 environment benefits everyone.

Another hot topic at the moment is that of server virtualisation. Since Microsoft released Hyper-V, and since the Hyper-V/VMWare debate/war has been raging, I am nearly always asked about it when visiting clients. The questions always revolve around the same topics: what is needed to be able to start virtualising servers?, how reliable it is?, will users be able to detect a difference when using a virtual server?, by how much can the costs actually be reduced?, etc.

With regards to the last question above about calculating the cost-saving (and linking to the first paragraph), I was sent an email recently from a friend with a link for a website where you could ‘instantly calculate’ the cost-saving benefits you could achieve if you used virtualisation technologies. Admittedly I was pretty dubious at first as I believed that being able to put a number to this had to be rather tricky because there are, in my opinion, too many immeasurable factors to consider. However, after going through the site and reading about the calculations and how they are made, I have to say that it is pretty impressive. They take into account not just the monetary savings of not running the physical hardware when you virtualise a server, but also things like the reduction in energy usage, support requirements, downtime, air conditioning, CO2 output, etc.

www.hyper-green.com

The above screenshots I took from the site itself, you can see it here if you want to calculate your own cost-savings, and you really should go through regardless of whether you believe or not the results. Before dismissing the site as mere marketing propaganda by Microsoft, I should point out that although it is a Microsoft site, most of the information (including the calculations of cost-saving) has been provided by an independent body (Alinean) rather than Microsoft.

Oh, and why is this post titled “Project Highlander”? Well, quite a while ago I was working at a bank in London that was seriously investigating how many servers could be virtualised in order to save IT expenditure. Management wanted us to reduce the number of physical servers to an absolute minimum as the bank was going through rather a bad time financially and they needed to make massive expenditure cuts. During one of the kick-off meetings the managers asked for a name for the project (perhaps more important than the actual project…?) to which a colleague of mine quipped “That’s easy, ‘Project Highlander’; because ‘there can be only one’! ”. Although he said it jokingly, the name was approved immediately! However, we never actually got the number of physical servers down to 1, as it was deemed a little too risky.

P.S. Unless you’ve seen the excellent film “Highlander” you won’t understand the previous paragraph…

P.P.S For my Spanish readers, the film was called “Los Imortales”, rather than “Highlander” in Spain.

Hyper-V going from strength to strength

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:11:54 GMT

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. The article is titled “Virtualization Continues to See Strong Growth in Second Quarter, According to IDC” and you can read it here.

The main points of the article are as follows:

Virtualization licence shipments in Q2 of 2008 increased 53% year over year.
VMWare holds the largest market share at 44% (combined VMWare ESX and VMWare Server) however Microsoft now holds a market share of 23% (combined Hyper-V and Virtual Server).

When IDC previously reported on this in October 2006, their report stated that Microsoft’s share of the virtualization market was 8.6%. Which means that since October 2006 till Q2 of 2008, Microsoft’s share has grown substantially. What has happened in that period to explain such growth? Well, Hyper-V was released!

This can only be good news for Microsoft because Hyper-V is a great virtualization product that really is worth looking at if you are considering any virtualization technology; if only my anti-MS brother would open his eyes to this fact though…

HTAMount – Simplifying the mounting of Hyper-V VHD files to your computer

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:38:00 GMT

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 of the images via a WMI interface. Attached to this post is a zip file that contains the application, hopefully you'll find it useful.

It should be pretty self-explanatory regarding how to use it. To mount a VHD file, just click the ‘Browse…’ button to select the VHD file you wish to mount, select the ‘Mount’ radio option, then press the ‘Mount / Unmount’ button. To unmount a VHD file, just select it from the list of currently mounted VHD files (you might need to refresh this list using the button), choose the ‘Unmount’ radio option and then press the ‘Mount / Unmount’ button. I can’t guarantee that the code is bug-free, although I have been using it for a while and I think I have solved any issues with it. If you do find anything that needs fixing, please comment on this post to let me know!

I got the inspiration for developing this tool from a script that the ‘Virtual PC Guy’ posted back in February 2008. Whilst the script is correct and works great, it had a couple of things that I didn’t like. Namely, the fact that you need to hard-code the path to the VHD file you want to mount, and that you need to extend the script a bit (or create a 2nd separate one) in order to be able to unmount a VHD file. So, HTAMount was born.

One thing that is important is that you run the application elevated (if you have UAC enabled) as it makes use of the Windows executable diskpart.exe which requires the highest security level to run. By default, Windows 2008 does not provide the “Run as Administrator” option when you right-click on a HTA file; however, with a simple change in the registry, you can add this option to the menu for these files.

The option in the context-menu for HTA files that is lacking by default

Included in the attached zip file is a text file that you can rename to a .reg file after extracting it from the zip archive. Double-clicking on this file will import its contents into your registry, instantly adding the item to the context menu.

The VBS code is commented, so feel free to open it up with Notepad to see how it all works. I have also added to the code some comments regarding certain routines, and why I have used them; If you can see any improvements that could be made in the code, I would be interested to know!

This is not an ‘in-development’ tool. I don’t spend time revising the code, unless I experience an error while using it. So don’t expect any updates to it unless either I find a bug, or someone else comments on this page with an error that I then fix. Of course, feel free to suggest new features although I cannot promise anything. Finally, please don’t distribute this code on a different website., link back to my blog post instead. This is important so that people will always have the latest version, and know that the source of the download is from the author.

Bugfix: fixed a bug where the interface remained locked when pressing "Unmount" while no disks were mounted.

Letting Hyper-V get some sleep

Daniel Oxley — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:04:00 GMT

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 to the usual boring rants where the author used a dollar sign instead of the letter S when they wrote the word Microsoft.

I still stand by what I said about the reasoning for the decision to disable this functionality as it makes good sense, and frankly hibernation/sleep is something that I can live without because Hyper-V is so good. Basically, the functionality is disabled for 2 reasons:

The percentage of people who run Windows Server 2008 on a laptop compared to those that run it on 'server' hardware is tiny.
Nearly everyone who will be using Hyper-V will be using it on hardware that will never need to be put into hibernation/sleep (when was the last time you wanted to put one of the servers to sleep in your data centre?).

So, to make the best product possible the Hyper-V team devoted their time to getting a great product shipped that had the right features, was stable and reliable; without trying to cater for every possible scenario by cramming in features that a very small percentage of people would use. What we have today is hypervisor technology that is small, fast and rock solid; those facts to most people are more important that anything else.

However, it seems that some people still think that the above reasons are not valid, and that hibernation/sleep should be available. Well there is a way to get that functionality back without having to uninstall Hyper-V, however it is almost certainly not a supported method by Microsoft so you are on your own.

During system boot the file hvboot.sys loads, and it is this file that disables the hibernation/sleep functionality on laptops. So, by changing the following registry keys you can enable/disable the loading of this file. By doing this you'll get back the hibernation/sleep functionality, but at the cost of losing Hyper-V. Also, to make the change requires a system reboot which can be a pain.

Gain hibernation/sleep - lose Hyper-V:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hvboot]

"Start"=dword:00000003

Lose hibernation/sleep - gain Hyper-V:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hvboot]

"Start"=dword:00000000

Having Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V on a laptop is a great combination, I myself have it on my company laptop. Perhaps the solution offered here can help out those people that have been previously frustrated with Hyper-V because of the lose of hibernation/sleep.

The final nail in VMWare's coffin?

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:57:00 GMT

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 for some interesting news articles to be written by people who could be considered more neutral than me because they are not associated with Microsoft. Well, I have seen the following two articles this week that really seem to suggest that VMWare does not have a particularly bright future ahead of them, now that the final version of Hyper-V is out.

The first is this article which reports that VMWare has had a change of management and has also admitted that their predicted revenue is on the way down, along with their share price.

The second is this article which predicts that Hyper-V will surpass VMWare within the next 3 to 5 years. I especially like the image that this article has inline with the text...

Will a new headstone be required for VMWare before too long...?

Disconnecting Hyper-V

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:51:00 GMT

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 has really bugged me, the lack of wireless support to link VMs directly to the wireless adapter of the host. I barely use wired connections anymore, both my home and the Microsoft office have full wireless coverage, which always gave me problems as it meant that my VMs never had an Internet connection. Sure, I could have used a physical cable (which is what I have been doing) but this not particularly practical, especially at home where I have my wireless router stashed under the sofa!

I had previously unsuccessfully tried this article by the Virtual PC Guy to get the wireless working, albeit in an unsupported configuration. I didn't like this solution for 2 reasons: the first is that it didn't work for me, and the second is that it created a NAT'd solution which I didn't want. However, last week I had a moment of clarity and subsequently kicked myself for not thinking of it before, as it is not particularly complicated. Why not just bridge my Hyper-V network with my wireless one?????

The biggest plus for me with this solution is that the VMs are connected directly to the same network as the host, so will not need any extra network configuration, especially if your host network uses DHCP. Following the simple steps below will give you instant Internet connectivity in the VMs!

Create an internal Hyper-V network, and give it an obvious name.

Open the Network Connections folder via the Network and Sharing Center. Select the wireless adapter and the new Hyper-V internal network you just created, right-click one of them and choose "Bridge Connections". After a few seconds a new item will appear in the list called "Network Bridge".

That's it, you don't need to do anything else. Your VMs should instantly get access to the Internet as long as they are mapped to the new internal network you have created. This can be done by opening the settings for the VM and changing the mapped network in the configuration for the network adapter.

One thing I should mention though is that the use of a wireless card to provide network services to Hyper-V is not a supported configuration by Microsoft, although it does work very well :-)

Hyper-V causing a negative effect on...

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:41:45 GMT

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 final version of Hyper-V was released.

Hyper-V on the side

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:06:00 GMT

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, here: http://mindre.net/post/Hyper-V-Monitor-Gadget-for-Windows-Sidebar.aspx

Getting my bits in a twist

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:04:35 GMT

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 far as I was concerned I had installed Windows Vista with Service Pack 1, something which winver.exe confirmed, but the components still refused to install. I started thinking it was a bug in RC1 of Hyper-V, so I set about to write up a query with the internal help email list we have. I opened up the system information screen to compile the info for my email when I noticed my mistake...

Without realising, I had put the Windows Vista x64 DVD into the drive rather than the x86 version. Consequently, I had installed Windows Vista 64bit, for which Hyper-V does not have the integration services available. :-(

Back to square 1 then. It is always a nice feeling to realise that you have lost an hour or so because of doing something rather silly. Sigh...

Insomnia-causing Hyper-V

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:03:27 GMT

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' people have is regarding typical laptop functionality that is lost when you enable Hyper-V on a laptop with Windows Server 2008 installed. Basically, when you enable Hyper-V on a laptop you lose the Sleep and Hibernate power features that you had before enabling Hyper-V. These features completely disappear when you install the role and you cannot re-enable them, nor hack the registry in order to get them back; Windows Server 2008 is pretty much just told to forget all about these power-saving features. So, when you close the lid of your laptop nothing happens. When you battery runs out of power the machine will shutdown or turn off, there is no gracefully power down into hibernation mode saving your desktop session and everything else that you were doing at the time.

As you can see in the screenshot below on the left, the only options available are "Do nothing" or "Shut down" if I close the lid on my laptop whereas before enabling Hyper-V I had the option "Sleep" in the list as well. In the second screenshot on the right you can see that for "Critical battery action" the only option available is "Shut down" which before would have been "Hibernate".

A lot of people tell me that they do not like this because the Sleep mode of laptops is super useful, especially when moving around the office when you need to carry the laptop with you. The reasoning behind taking the decision to disable this functionality is simple; Windows Server 2008 is a server operating system and was not designed to accommodate all the functionality that laptop users want or need. If you have a server running 20 virtual servers, you are extremely unlikely to ever need to hibernate it at all, or even want to. And even if you could it would probably cause some bizarre things to happen inside the VMs as the hardware devices powered off.

So, if you really need to be able to put your laptop to sleep, then you are better off running Windows Vista, or dual-booting your machine with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. Me? I am happy to accept the loss of this functionality as I find Hyper-V so useful. I have set the laptop to "Do nothing" if I close the lid and it shuts itself down when the battery goes flat.

Hyper-V - Hooray!

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:36:33 GMT

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 most favourite feature is without a doubt, Hyper-V. I ~~have~~ had been a long time user/fan of Virtual Server 2005 so I was looking forward to switching over to Hyper-V to see what it was like; well, it is worth the change! It has all the features that I need from VS2005 plus plenty more, and best of all, it does not seem to drag down the overall performance of my machine too much when I have a couple of VM's running at once, like VS2005 used to.

But, what do I miss from VS2005? Well, erm, nothing! The only negative point about Hyper-V is that I won't like going back to using VS2005 when I am working with a Windows Server 2003 in a client office. I will not be going back to Windows Vista on my laptop though because the advantages of having Hyper-V are just too great.

Just in case anyone has not seen the Hyper-V console window, here is a screenshot of it along with a view of the configuration settings for a VM. Not too much to see really, but then there is not too much that I need to configure!

Also, here is an interesting article about the increasing frequency with which VMWare are releasing patches for ESX Server. http://www.virtualization.info/2007/12/patch-tuesday-for-vmware.html Now, before anyone tries to flame me then try to shot holes in Hyper-V, me or anything else; read the next sentence. I am not commenting on the article whatsoever other than saying that it is interesting. So please, no more Micro$oft comments or emails as it gets rather boring.