Hyper-V Server

Today, Microsoft announced the availiablity of the free Hyper-V Server.

I quickly downloaded the 1.09GB ISO and began installation. Installation took about 15 minutes in a VM with ~1.5GB memory.

Here are some Hyper-V Server screenshots:

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Hyper-V Server

Intial Configuration Script

Available & Installed Packages

The majority of the installation was the exact same as a Server 2008 install except there is no version/type selection (std, ent, dc/full, core). The text-based initial script enables quick configuration without memorizing the netdom and netsh commands . Further, from the last screenshot, we can see the small number of packages that come with Hyper-V and that only one is installed. This is considerably different from a basic Hyper-V Server Core installation, illustrated below.

Server Core with Hyper-V

Microsoft did a good job of stripping unecessary components as well as making an easy-to-install and easy-to-initialize Hyper-V solution. Thanks!

Links:

http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/default.mspx

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2008/10/01/Bare-metal-hypervisor-is-here_2C00_-along-with-new-training_2C00_-services.aspx

Hyper-V and recursive virtualization

After I got ESXi to run inside of Workstation 6.5. I asked myself, "Can Hyper-V run within Workstation 6.5?"

Well, the role installs, and I can create Hyper-V virtual machines, but I can't start them:

Note that I have two VMs running. The main VM in the screen shot is my Server 2008 Enterprise Full Domain Controller while the Server 2008 x64 Enterprise Core Hyper-V server. I made the same modification to the Core VMX as I did for the ESXi-3 VM from my earlier post. The Hyper-V role installed and updated fine. As you can see from the screen shot, I was able to manage Hyper-V remotely and create a VM. When I connect to the VM to start it, it displays the error message that it cannot create the partition because of an unspecified error 0x80004005. There aren't many search results about this error with Hyper-V other than two forum posts (one of which I posted an updated error message). There are some results about the error code.

I attempted the same thing in a Full installation and the Hyper-V installation was prevented by ServerManager. Is possible that ocsetup, the utility which installs Hyper-V in CORE does not properly detect VT and DEP capabilities and thus allows installation on non-Hyper-V supported hardware? I ran ocsetup on the Full installation, and the role installs just fine....

An error occurs upon attempting to start the VMbus:

John Howard mentions that this could happen if resources are scarce. In my instance, I confirm that it is unsupported hardware with no driver:

Looks like Hyper-V isn't actually running. Apparently ocsetup doesn't prevent installation of Hyper-V as ServerManager does...