Hyper-V: Day 1

Despite all the benefits, I felt that installing and setting up Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 is so much easier than Hyper-V... However, with a 64-bit Quad Core processing power and 4 gigs of RAM, I felt that it would be an injustice if I totally disregarded the potential of hyper-V.. so moving on..

Day 1

After getting the Hyper-V role up and running on the machine, I started to create a new VM. Unlike VS 2005, I can set the initial size of the virtual disk (VHD) to more than 127 GB (the IDE limit). However, VS allows me to emulate a SCSI virtual disk while I couldn't see that option when I'm setting up the vhd in Hyper-V. I've set up the initial size of the disk to 200 GB - this should be sufficient, or so I thought.

Setting up the Windows 2000 Server VM, I noticed that the maximum unallocated space being reported is just 127 GB. Inside disk management, I couldn't find the extra 73 GB. WTH? I deleted the VM and created a new one with a max of 127 GB.

After installing the Windows 2000. I was presented with another problem. Well, two actually. First, I couldn't get the VMbus to work properly in Windows 2000. VMbus allows VM guest operating systems to communicate directly with the hardware by using the drivers of the parent partition (host operating system in VM lingo) through the VMbus. To use VMbus, the Integration Services must be deployed, but unfortunately, it is not supported in Windows 2000. Second, I found out that for legacy systems such as Windows 2000, only the legacy network adapter works.

After having installed the legacy network adapter in the VM, changes were made in the parent partition. First, the host network adapter assigned to the VM became the Virtual Network Switch. Second, a new virtual network adapter was created in the parent partition. This allows the parent partition and all the virtual machines to communicate with the physical network via the virtual network switch. That was something new and it took me a really long while to make it work.

Without the VMbus, I'm now stuck with the default VgaSave adapter. Still has to look for compatible drivers. After that, I'll try to finish installing the BackOffice 2000 legacy systems inside the VM.