With the availability of dynamic memory in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 there are some changes to how you need to handle memory as a scripter / developer. The WMI API changes are now documented here Most of the changes are fairly obvious – but two not so obvious properties are the properties for the “Startup RAM” and “Maximum RAM”. In WMI these are .. more »

Most people I know who have spent a lot of time with Hyper-V have had the experience of accidentally taking too much memory away from the parent partition. This happens when they start too many virtual machines – and all of a sudden the performance and responsiveness of the parent partition goes down significantly. The response from people who hi.. more »

over on the virtualization team blog, but as a general rule of thumb we believe that it is much better to have paging occur inside the guest operating system rather than at the virtualization layer (if paging is needed). The simple reason for this is that the guest operating system has far better understanding of which are the best sections of .. more »

With Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 we have added a number of new performance counters for dynamic memory. These counters allow you to get some extra insight into what is actually happening with memory on your Hyper-V server. The counters are grouped in two categories. First is “Hyper-V Dynamic Memory VM”: These counters allow you to access spec.. more »

When you use dynamic memory with Hyper-V one of the obvious changes to the user interface is the addition of the “Memory Availability” column: This is actually a really useful figure to have handy. What memory available represents is the ratio of how much memory a virtual machine has – compared to how much memory the virtual machine needs. For ex.. more »

I am a bit late in getting this post up (due to being on the road at TechEd Australia & TechEd New Zealand); but last week we released a hotfix rollup package. This package includes the fixes for three of the five issues that . The specific issues that are addressed are: . Some of you reported that this did not solve the problem for you. The hotfix .. more »

For as long as I can remember – I have been talking to people about supported / optimal virtual processor to logical processor ratios with Hyper-V. Or – said with less technical jargon – how many virtual machines, with how many virtual processors, should you run on any given physical computer? Today our documented guidance is that we support up to .. more »

I got asked this question a couple of weeks ago – and I did not know the answer. After a bit of investigation – I now know the answer – and thought I would take the time to share it with the world (if you do not know what Sysprep is – go and ). The short answer is: The long answer is as follows: Prior to Window Server 2008 R2 (namely in Windows .. more »

After writing the script to find all virtual hard disks associated with a virtual machine – the next logical step was to answer some questions about these virtual hard disks. The two obvious questions that I could think of were: So I modified yesterdays script to answer these questions: # Prompt for the Hyper-V Server to use "Specify the Hyper-V Se.. more »

This is something that sounds really simple to start with – but gets more complicated the more you think about it. The question is: how do you identify all virtual hard disks that are associated with a given virtual machine? Your first response might be “you open the virtual machine settings and have a look there!” But what if your virtual machin.. more »

Last week I received the latest support call statistics for Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 – and it seems that a number of you are hitting problems that we know about – and have hotfixes “ready to go” for. So I would like to take a moment to bring these hotfixes to your attention. The first three are system crashes that are caused by processo.. more »

Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 installed so you can manage a Hyper-V server – and you then install the service pack 1 beta on the Hyper-V server – how can you manage dynamic memory remotely? The first thing to know is that by default – everything will continue to function correctly – but the Hyper-V management tools on Windows .. more »

After installing the service pack 1 beta on Windows Server 2008 R2 you will see that virtual machines have a new setting for memory. The Memory priority: This setting is part of the new dynamic memory feature. And there is a lot to learn about it. The first thing to know is that this setting does not have any real effect if there is enough memory .. more »

When you enable dynamic memory on a virtual machine – one of the things you can configure is the memory buffer: You may be wondering what the story behind this setting is. First – you need to understand the core mechanism behind dynamic memory. At its heart dynamic memory is all about Hyper-V calculating an “ideal target memory value” for each run.. more »

Here is a good question – what happens if you install Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 beta, open the settings on a virtual machine, enable dynamic memory – but the guest operating system does not support dynamic memory? The first thing to know is that – yes, you can indeed do this. Hyper-V does not know what operating system is installed inside the vi.. more »

If you have not tried out dynamic memory yet – here is a handy step-by-step guide for how to get it setup. The first thing you need to do is to install the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 beta release. To do this you should: At this stage you will have the service pack 1 beta applied to your system – but you will not have enabled dynamic memory for any .. more »

tweetmeme_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2010/07/29/linux-integration-services-v2-1-now-available.aspx'; Over on the virtualization team blog – Mike Sterling has just announced the availability of the Linux Integration Services v2.1.  And there is a lot to announce here.  Along with the previous support for our high perf.. more »

tweetmeme_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2010/07/16/hyper-v-links-for-friday-night.aspx'; Well, the week is over so I thought I would quickly share some links. Vijay has posted a great article on how to install the SP1 beta on our standalone Hyper-V Server product.  So now you really have no excuse to not be looking at d.. more »

If you are thinking about trying out dynamic memory in the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 beta release – here are some handy resources to read before you get going: This paper talks about what dynamic memory is, what it does and how it does it. It is a good read for those curious to understand what is happening under the covers. This article steps yo.. more »

tweetmeme_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2010/07/12/dynamic-memory-beta-supported-guest-operating-systems.aspx'; At TechEd this year we announced that dynamic memory would be supported for virtual machines that were running the following guest operating systems: Windows Server 2003 Web, Standard, Enterprise & Datacenter .. more »