A while ago we announced that Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2 would support booting off of a USB flash device. We have now provided detailed documentation on how to set this up. Even cooler than booting Hyper-V off of a USB device is the fact that what we are doing is booting a VHD with Hyper-V installed on it off of a USB device: If you are like me .. more »

10) is when I start a virtual machine. A system that has this problem will either generate a continuous rate of TLB flushing above 100 or will generate spikes in the thousands. There are a couple of options here: Hopefully this has answered all of your questions satisfactorily. If you have any further questions please feel free to ask away. I .. more »

I have been wanting to come up with a workable solution for mounting virtual hard disks by double clicking on them in Windows 7 for a while now. The problem is that: The best idea I could think of for a simple solution was to try scripting the DISKPART tool. Unfortunately once I got going I got a bit carried away. The result is this batch file: If .. more »

While this will not surprise my regular readers some of you will be interested to know that blogging is usually only a very small fraction of my job. My official title is Program Manager Lead which means that my responsibilities roughly break down into the following buckets: As you can see that is a lot of non-blogging work. The truth is that I .. more »

When it comes to minimizing the potential for malicious software running in a virtual machine to affect your physical computer, there are two golden rules to follow: In the latter category there are three common paths: The first thing to know is that you can configure drive sharing so that only specific drives are shared: You should always make .. more »

I little while ago some member of the Hyper-V test team released a new tool on code.msdn.microsoft.com. It is the Virtual Machine Migration Test Wizard: In Windows Server 2008 R2 we introduced a new Processor Compatibility feature (as discussed ). The primary purpose of this new tool is to allow you to determine if you need to enable this feature .. more »

One of the cool features of Windows Virtual PC is how applications that are installed into Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 virtual machines automatically appear in the start menu on the host operating system and can be launched directly without first needing to open the virtual machine in question: These shortcuts get created through a .. more »

Like many Hyper-V users, I have created ISO images of most of my CDs / DVDs (and in the case of my MSDN software have downloaded in ISO format to begin with). I then have these images stored on a file server. It is possible to connect a CD ISO image on a file server to a Hyper-V virtual machine, as long as you are working in a domain environment .. more »

We have recently published a very handy video / guide / set of scripts to help with anyone who needs to deploy either a standard or customized version of Windows XP mode to a large number of virtual machines. The first thing to look at is the deployment video – available here: ht.. more »

People have asked me how you go about setting up a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) with Hyper-V. This is much easier than it sounds. The first thing to understand is that when you shut down the physical computer, the virtual machines will be automatically put into a saved state. Virtual machines that were running when the server shuts down will .. more »

Go and get it: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx Cheers, Ben.. more »

A virtualization MVP recently bought this to my attention: In Windows Server 2008 R2 there was a minor change to the format of differencing virtual hard disks.  As a result you will need to apply an update to Windows Server 2008 if you want to move differencing disks from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2008. You can download this update f.. more »

We have just released a new hotfix for Windows Server 2008 R2 that address the issue that users were getting a bluescreen of death on Intel Xeon 5500 series processor-based computers with the following text: 0x00000101 (parameter1, 0000000000000000, parameter3, 000000000000000c) CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT You can download the hotfix from .. more »

Here is a problem that I hear about at least 2 or 3 times a month: Someone is trying to do a network installation of an operating system using either Hyper-V or Virtual PC, they setup the virtual machine appropriately, but when they try to press “F12” to initiate network installation – nothing happens. Every time I get asked about this – the answ.. more »

We have just released a prebuilt Windows 7 evaluation virtual hard disk for use with Hyper-V that you can download from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=606ae07e-b7db-405b-974b-dd61fc41add4 Windows validation is required to be able to download this – and the copy of Windows is limited to 90 days.  But it is still a n.. more »

A while ago I blogged about how to allow . You do this by editing the Hyper-V authorization store. What I failed to mention at that time was that this method does not work if you are using SCVMM to manage your Hyper-V servers. When you start using SCVMM to manage a Hyper-V server, SCVMM creates their own authorization store to be used by Hyper-V. .. more »

The beta release of System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 is now available for download.  You can read more here: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/dataprotectionmanager/en/us/2010beta-overview.aspx And download it from here: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9686964 Key features that should be of interest to Hyper-V users are: .. more »

Last week I posted a description about the servers (physical and virtual) that I have configured . Today I would like to spend a moment to talk about how I manage this environment. All of my management is done from my Windows 7 computer. I had a couple of goals when setting up my management environment: To meet these goals I installed the Remote .. more »

The RTM builds of Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode are now available for people with an MSDN / TechNet subscription.  On MSDN you can sign in and: Go to Subscriber Downloads Select Applications Scroll to the bottom of the list and select Windows Virtual PC Cheers, Ben.. more »

The SysInternals team just announced the availability of a new tool: This is a tool that you run on a running Windows computer to create virtual hard disks copies of the physical disks that are attached. Under the covers this tool works by taking a Windows Volume Snapshot (VSS) image of the physical hard disk and then pouring that into a virtual .. more »