Fun with Hyper-V
Now that Hyper-V is generally available I’ve been spending a few days building a test lab server using hardware loaned by AMD.
On the surface the machine should be a fantastic workhorse for setting up a System Center virtual lab – a Dell Latitude D531 with the fast AMD Turion and 4GB RAM. Also – it’s a laptop – so it’s portable enough to be practical for a road-warrior.
I wiped off the default Vista Ultimate installation and started fresh with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition 64 bit. It installed well and the Dell drivers for 64 bit Vista work well.
The only problem I found (and I still haven’t resolved) is enabling the Hyper-V role. Every time the role is enabled the kernel boot parameters are changed to autostart the hypervisor; this causes the machine to lock on boot. I’ve searched – but there’s nothing online to fix it.
My fix that works it to boot to safe mode and disable the auto-start of the Hyper-V hypervisor.
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
Here is a great post from virtual_pc_guy on the MSDN blogs that describes doing this.
Hopefully this saves someone a few hours of pain.
