A Couple of Lessons in Getting Hyper-V To Work | Tue 22 Jun 2010 | Blog

A Couple of Lessons in Getting Hyper-V To WorkTue 22 Jun 2010

Three days after my new server arrived I finally have a Windows 2003 Virtual Machine running on it and my aim for today is to finally get SharePoint 2007 running on it.

Three days to install a VM? Afraid so and here's why:

Lesson 1

Ever waste a whole day of your life trying to install a driver for some hardware? I haven't for a long time, but did last Friday. Leaves you with a horrible feeling of un-achievement and no closure on the day. What did I achieve today? Bugger all!

After lots of red herrings I discovered that, when you enable the Hyper-V role, you can't use anything but the default VGA video driver at a non-widescreen resolution.

Hyper-V Does Not Work With Anything But VGA

To get Hyper-V working on my new server I had to use Device Manager to disable the on-board display adapter, which forced Windows to use the standard VGA adapter. It looks a bit iffy running on a widescreen LCD, but hey, most of my interaction with it will be via RDP where it supports the same (1900*1200) resolution of my main display. Odd.

Lesson 2

If, once you have Hyper-V running, you want to install Windows 2003 in a host VM then you'll need to make sure you install Win2003 Service Pack 1 or later from the off. Otherwise you won't be able to get networking to work.

Once you've installed Win2003 you need to connect to it from the Hyper-V manager and boot it up. Then, from the Action menu of the Hyper-V client choose "Insert Integration Services Setup Disk". This mounts an ISO file and installs the required network adapter drivers. Until you do that it will appear the guest OS has no adapter in the list of hardware.

Comments

- Jerry Carter
- Tue 22 Jun 2010 08:42 AM
Sorta makes sense... really the host OS is only ever accessed for maintenance and a lot of rack systems have plain old simple VGA displays or are remote desktop'd. I know a rack mount Dogger is not, but from a network admin perspective (which I'm not, but spend a lot of time around) I get it. The Server family of windows OS's are really meant to be austere and seldom directly used. All processing effort is saved for the main activities, like hosting your virtual machines. Think of it like the race horse analogy... you never see a race horse make a face when they run hard because they save every bit of energy (or processing power in the case of your server) for running fast.

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1. - Jake Howlett
  - Tue 22 Jun 2010 08:49 AM
  It makes sense. But, what doesn't make sense is that it doesn't make you aware of this issue at the point you enable Hyper-V and/or disable "advanced" display adapters for you. instead it either BSODs on reboot or shows a corrupted/blank display which means you can't login.
  
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  1. - Jerry Carter
    - Tue 22 Jun 2010 08:57 AM
    Yeah. That only makes sense in the context that it is a Microsoft product. :-)
    
    Reply
    1. - Flaz
      - Tue 22 Jun 2010 01:19 PM
      LOL!
      Jake: why not ESXi?
      
      Reply
      1. Jake Howlett
        
        Tue 22 Jun 2010 04:25 PM
        
        Thought I'd stick to what I know and understand (Windows). ESXi is new to me and I didn't want to spend time getting to know it.
        Also, the Windows 2008 host OS is also going to function as the Active Direction PDC, DNS server etc. I know it probably shouldn't, but I want to squeeze as much out of this box as I can. By using Hyper-V instead of ESXi I get an extra server for free, in effect, as I see it anyway.
        
        Reply
        
        IanB
        
        Tue 22 Jun 2010 05:27 PM
        
        You don't get an extra server Jake. the Windows Server 2008 instance can be used to host itself (and other servers) in only the Hyper-V role.
        unless you're not loading 2008 into a guest machine, and only using other guest OS's?
        
        Reply
        
        Jake Howlett
        
        Thu 24 Jun 2010 07:41 AM
        
        Hi Ian. I don't get what you're saying? Even though I've read it a few times, it's not sinking in.
        
        Reply
        
        ianb
        
        Sat 26 Jun 2010 04:15 PM
        
        sorry Jake, meant: if you host your copy of Windows Server 2008 in Windows 2008 running Hyper-V, then you're not allowed to use the Host for anything else so no benefit over esxi or xenserver* so, you can't buy 2008 Server run Domain Services and Hyper-V, and then load it again as a guest running, for example sharepoint.
        You can, however, run it as a guest on the host under the same license as long as it's #only# running Hyper-V.
        If you have the enterprise license you can run four guests and an additional fifth as the host (again #only# running hyper-v).
        *which you may want to try - very easy to get up and running 'ten (minutes) to zen' as they say
        
        This reply is already 8 levels deep and so replying at this level is disabled.
- Roy Rumaner
- Tue 22 Jun 2010 09:41 AM
Well that is interesting. I have been trying to set up a Wndows 2008 box with Hyper-V as well. I have a 22" widescreen monitor on it and now I know why it won't go wide.

Reply
- Chris
- Mon 28 Jun 2010 05:53 PM
There's a reason for this.
Once you turn a system into a hyper-v host, the host os is accessing some components through the hypervisor.
Couple of good articles here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/08/21/hyper-v-versus-desktop-computing.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961661
Ben Armstrong is awesome for HyperV help: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy
Really if you're running on a desktop machine, you're probably better off going with Windows Virtual PC rather than Hyper-V. You'll have a much better experience.
Hyper-V totally isolates the guest OS from the host, so you don't have any of the integration (copy/paste, etc) that you do with Virtual PC.
Good Luck!

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