Tim Mangan - All Comments

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Tim Mangan — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:38:33 GMT

Not dispair, <i>disillusionment</i>!

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Chris Garcia — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 06:49:31 GMT

Just double checked...I've got Hyper-V manager working in a Workgroup. It wasn't easy and I spent a couple hours playing with firewalls and user accounts/passwords and google to get it all working.

I decided to curl up with Hyper-V for a few hours a few nights ago since I needed to build a WinPE boot drive...Here's some of my hard won learning:

- Hyper-V VMs do not support USB natively - at least not through Hyper-V manager connection and you certainly can't boot to a USB device. Turns out you *can* use MSTSC with the 'connect to local devices' setting to access USB devices (you still cannot boot to said USB device).

- PE does not support MS Hyper-V networking natively. You must inject the Hyper-V VM networking drivers into your PE build. This is a huge, huge, huge pain. There are step by steps out there but they made a lot of assumptions and I ended up doing it by hand. Again, not for faint of heart but ulitmately was successful.

- Vista Ultimate (bare bones, installed fresh 24 hours earlier with no Hotfixes, SPs etc) + WS2008 + blank VM for testing PE maxed out my admittedly meager 2GB RAM on my D630. Completely anecdotal and I'm not griping -- just interesting is all.

I ended up ditching the dream of Hyper-V management from my hypervisor Hyper-V notebook. Too many obstacles that I cannot overcome. I'll wait for someone else to create it for me. I am probably on to XenDesktop next. We'll see how that one goes. Mangan -- I'll wait for your step by step tale of heartache and despair "A look at "XenDesktop" on a Notebook" before I start.

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

cpqalve — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:11:43 GMT

Hi Tim,

Great article, and you have saved me a lot of time, since I was just about to install Hyper-V on a notebook as well, but after reading your post, i've changed plans immediately.

Alex

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Tim Mangan — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:04:59 GMT

The HV Manager works only if machines are in the same domain. It may be possible for non domain machines, but you might end up spending the 10 hours to get those to work.

You will want to look on the web for a tool called HVRemote by John Honward to attempt this. John originally wrote a 5 part blog on how to get it to work, and then wrote this vbscript tool to automate what he wrote.

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Chris Garcia — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:41:47 GMT

I myself have had the dream of running my VMs on a bare metal hypervisor and while I was thoroughly entertained by your recounting of my own experience I was ultimately disappointed to read that you also had your dreams dashed against the rocks.

Like you (and now many others) I believe this is the way of the future. Just wish it were sooner rather than later. I guess we'll have to muddle through with VMWare Wkstn for a while longer.

Before I spend another 10 hours trying to get .NET and the downloadable Hyper-V Manager for Vista installed on my Hyper-V server I was wondering what is the group's prediction for success?

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Thomas McKinley — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:09:59 GMT

Its amazing even now with all of the great tools that are available today [many free] people still make things harder then they have to be.

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Tim Mangan — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:06:31 GMT

Hey Joe. Thanks for the heads up on XenServer express - sounds just like HVS!

By the way, I use VMware Workstation on my own laptop currently. I am usually flipping between it and Virtual PC depending on who release the latest and greatest features. I am wating to hear what happens with Kidaro this winter with hope that their might be something released under the hood and will get me to switch back again.

And Mr. MVP doesn't have licenses to hand out to family. He has to follow license agreements just like everyone else.

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Joe Shonk — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:38:25 GMT

Why does it have to be a bare-metal hypervisor? The type 2 (host based) hypervisor are pretty good and even better at certain workloads (multi-media, graphics, games) than a bare-metal hypervisor.

Second, why not just put a Full Install of 2008 and run Hyper-V? It's running a bare-metal hypervisor and you can manage it. :o) Plus, Mr. MVP has licenses for it.

Also, why not downgrade to XP? It's still a better OS than Vista and still keeps you in the MS world (Office, Outlook, Project, Visio... etc)

XenServer Express won't help.. There is no integrated GUI. You have to run the console from another machine.

Joe

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Tony — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:34:53 GMT

I'm amazed just how well Ubuntu 8.10 runs on a notebook. I've dabbled in Linux distros only to get to that one point where something doesn't work right - WiFi, NIC drivers, correct display drivers etc. That 8.10 distro is gold!

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Tim Mangan — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:23:20 GMT

The point was to run a bare-metal hypervisor. Not a hypervisor running on top of another OS (or install a full Windows Server Core).

I have no doubt that this is where we all will be with notebooks in the future. VMWare has announced theirs, but is not delivering. Microsoft has one out, but as lamented here it isn't ready for this kind of use. Citrix has one (XenExpress), and maybe I should have pulled that one out but ran out of time.

By the way, she did end up with Ubuntu Desktop 8.10, and she didn't want a Mac.

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Tony — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:45:59 GMT

Throw away a perfectly working laptop - assuming a relatively new one being that it was pre-installed with Vista and buy a Mac...how cost effective.

I love Mac's just as much as you guys, but I don't think that's a viable solution.

Why not install Ubuntu 8.10 (which is a great distro) and run VMWare Server for Linux on it with an XP VM?

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Joe Shonk — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:50:18 GMT

I'll second Shawn Bass' recommendation. Be a good Daddy and buy her a Mac. :o) The other nice this about VMFusion (or Parallels) is you can integrate it with Boot camp, so if you absolutely need to run Vista on raw hardware for performance you can.

Joe

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Shawn Bass — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:51:05 GMT

Or you could just buy her a Mac which would give her a *nix variant of which she could use VMWare Fusion to install her crappy Vista OS on top of. My .02 is that you're going to want something like VMware Fusion or VMware workstation if you want any hope of running decent graphics in the VM layer.

Shawn

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Tony — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:09:35 GMT

I tried something similar, but just installed 2008 w/ Hyper-V on my new Dell Latitude 4300...Wanted to use 2008 as the primary OS, but run VM's like Ubuntu and XP however there are no SATA or NIC drivers from Dell that work with 2008 on that particular notebook...tried hacking Vista x64 drivers as well with no luck. I pinged a colleague from Dell about it and they said they would have drivers that will work with the new E series Latitudes Q1-2009.

re: A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook

Mike DiPetrillo — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 02:02:54 GMT

Why not just download the FREE VMware Converter tool, P2V your existing Vista image, install new Vista (or Linux) as the host, install VMware Workstation, and then put your converted image back into place as a VM? If your daughter really is switching to Computer Science then she'll have the best virtual coding platform out there. There's integration with the common IDEs, record/replay, snapshots, etc. It would be much better than trying to run Hyper-V Server as the base platform.