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When talking about Hyper-V with customers or colleagues, I notice that there is quite some confusion around the definition of Hyper-V Server and Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Server 2008 / 2008-R2
The Hyper-V Server is a stand-alone product, which contains only the Windows Hypervisor, Windows Server driver model and virtualization components.  What’s important to know, the Hyper-V Server comes for FREE!.

No, Hyper-V Server is not just Windows Server Core + Hyper-V, the only thing this server is designed for is virtualization and therefore does not contain any other server roles.

Windows Server 2008 / 2008-R2 with Hyper-V
Here Hyper-V is an enabled server role running on Windows Server 2008 (64 bit) or Windows Server 2008 R2 (note that Server 2008 R2 only comes in 64 bit).

The below table provides an overview of the Hyper-V Server and Windows Server products.

Source: Microsoft

Other Sources:

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Preview (Paul Thurrot)

Microsoft TechNet – Hyper-V

First Look: Hyper-V Server

This morning i had an issue with a fileserver that is running as a guest on a Hyper-V server, far away from my location, in fact I did not even know what Hyper-V system is hosting that Fileserver. I wanted to see within Hyper-V manager how the system is doing, but without knowing the Hyper-V server host name, you can’t connect (kind of logic)

So what’s the name of the underlying server that is hosting my virtual server ? A friend within my team found the answer.

To my surprise this information is stored within the guest windows registry under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Virtual Machine\Guest\Parameters as shown in the picture below.

Talking to people about virtualization almost every day, I notice that many aren’t that familiar yet with all the terminologies. Ben Armstrong has written two good articles on his blog, describing all the terminologies used around Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Terminology

Hyper-V Terminology Update

One of the things that seems to confuse people a lot is understanding the difference between Hyper-V Server and Hyper-V on Server 2008. I take the freedom of copying Ben’s explanation (below).

Microsoft Hyper-V Server
When you see people talk about “Microsoft Hyper-V Server” they are talking about the stand alone version of Hyper-V.  The simple rule here is the “Microsoft” means that you are not talking about a full Windows installation.  From a Microsoft lexicon point of view software is either part of Windows – and gets the Windows naming (e.g. Windows Powershell) or is not part of Windows and gets the Microsoft naming (e.g. Microsoft Office).

Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 / Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role enabled
The part is a little clumsy.  While we have the “Windows Server 2008 without Hyper-V” SKU, its alternative is just “Windows Server 2008”.  But in order to avoid confusing people into thinking there is another SKU you will never see Microsoft say “Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V” as that sounds to close to the aforementioned SKU name.  As a result you will see the above terms used to refer to a Windows Server 2008 system that has Hyper-V enabled (as compared to a Windows Server 2008 system that does not have Hyper-V enabled).

Today I’ve tested the WIM2VHD script provided by Mike Kolitz a Software Design Engineer from the Hyper-V Team at Microsoft.

In short, the script allows you to create a bootable VHD file directly from Windows 7 installation media, so you don’t need to go through the whole Windows Installation process. Once the VHD is completed, you can move it directly into your Hyper-V System and boot the operating system.

Detailed information about the script can found on the MSDN Code Gallery – Windows(R) Image to Virtual Hard Disk (WIM2VHD) Converter.
Note that you must have the Windows 7 AIK installed to run this script. The script provides a lot of optional command line options, the shortest with using all default settings is as following:

cscript wim2vhd.wsf /wim:d:\sources\install.wim /sku:ULTIMATE

If you don’t feel like trying it out yourself but want to see how things are working, watch the video below.

With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V will also support “Live Migration”. Today Hyper-V provides “Quick Migration” which still means a short downtime, with Live Migration a move from one to another Hyper-V system can be performed without any system downtime.

A feature overview document can be found here. And a step by step guide can be found on TechNet here.

Confused about all the different solutions around Virtualization ? then get the “Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions” eBook. The document gives you all the information you need to better understand the various Virtualization offerings Microsoft has available today and will release in the near future.

Today I wanted to find out a little bit more about the differences between VMWare ESX and ESXi. Since it doesn’t make sense that i rewrite what others have written already let me share the sources i have found.

ESX and ESXi comparison from VMWare

How does VMware ESXi Server compare to ESX Server? from David Davis on Virtualization.com

The Architecture of VMWare ESXi from VMWare

ESX and ESXi comparison from the Virtual Troll

Additionally find a comparison between VMWare ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V here, but in all fairness like many experts say, currently we’re talking about two different leagues here. Additionally note that this comparison is provided by VMWare and we all know that when a product vendor creates comparisons themselves they are of course to highlight their own features over the competitors product.

Great article i just finished reading about automating virtual machine host deployment on Hyper-V.

Download the complete Technet Magazine January 2009 edition here. When having trouble reading the CHM file, read this.

First let me avoid confusion here, I’m not talking about “dynamically expanding” discs but about the disc type e.g. Basic and Dynamic.

In the past weeks we have been migrating some of our physical servers into Hyper-V. Just before X-mas my colleague had prepared a plain Windows 2003 system for me so that i could continue with installing the necessary applications that were planned to run on that system. Two discs were created, the primary disc that contains the boot partition is connected to an IDE controller and the second disc to a SCSI controller.  Note that the OS boot disc must always be connected to an IDE controller. So the disk layout looks as following:

Here comes the issue we ran in….. Upon every system reboot Windows lost the second DATA disc. and it would only come back after manually reactivating the disc within the disc management console. After some web searches i came across the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article that explains this behaviour: SCSI disks are disconnected in the child partition of Hyper-V.

The problem was related to the fact that the DATA disc was configured as a “dynamic” disc ^so we had to change that to a basic disc. Since you can’t convert a dynamic disc to a basic disc without data loss (unless you follow this non-supported hardcore method) a second BASIC disc had to be created and the data needed to be copied from the old DATA disc to the new one. Once completed the dynamic disc can be deleted. In the end the disc layout looks as following.

All works fine now, and discs don’t get disconnected after a system reboot. Leasson learned: Don’t use dynamic discs in Hyper-V.

It’s about 48 hours ago , that i started with setting up a System Center Virtual Machine Manager environment, No worries, i have been doinng otherthings in between, although today , uhm yesterday I spend most of the time with it. Also the hardware I have available , isn’t realy that powerfull, so it all takes a bit time, but that’s okay, while waiting I’ve just continued reading.

So for all those that plan to give SCVMM a try as well but don’t have big powerfull servers available let me encourage you, my setup is as following:

• Windows 2008 x64 with Hyper-V runs on a HP 8710p notebook with a 150 GB disk and 2 GB RAM
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager runs on Windows 2008 x64 that runs in a WMWare Workstation session that runs on a HP dc7800 desktop with 2 GB RAM, the session has 1024 GB RAM assigned
• The System Center Virtual Machine Manager Console is installed on Windows Vista SP1 that runs in a VMWare Workstation Session that runs on another desktop with 3 GB RAM.
• An Active Directory is required, not for the guest systems you run in SCVMM but for SCVMM itself. I run the AD on a Windows 2003 Server within VMWare as well, as i was slowly running out of RAM on my physical machine, i just gave it a 256 MB RAM, works well so far.

In general i do strongly recommend that before you start installing the various component, you make sure you are working with a most resent installation, e.g. Vista must be SP1 and for Windows Server 2008, there are a couple of important updates to be applied, espeically to update the Hyper-V Server. Read Warning on Hyper-V hosts under SCVMM for more details.

The first page to start is the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager site. More VM related links can be found on the Virtual PC Guy blog.

To be continued….

Tomorrow there are plans to move some VMWare slices into Hyper-V. In preparation of that i have found the following article on TechNet

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/ef8c12f7-c45d-442e-9a30-c43cd87df3b3/

and on vmToolkit there is a the tool VMDK to VHD converter that should help doing the job, so far for the theory, hope it works out.

Steven Bink owner of the famous Bink.nu web site has launched a new site dedicated to Microsoft Hyper-V and related technologies called Hypervoria