Mark's Windows Server Blog

Useful Hyper-V links

• Sean Earp has taken a look at running various Linux distributions on Hyper-V (although without integration components they will be running in emulation mode - which will negatively impact performance).
• As for the aforementioned Linux integration components (ICs), it seems that they are still under development but release candidate 2 Linux ICs are available.
• Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) is not on the list of supported operating systems either but, being a Windows-derivative, ICs can be added to WinPE (and Mike Sterling has provided an updated script for the RTM Hyper-V ICs).
• Earlier this year, John Howard wrote about how to turn on hardware assisted virtualisation but Michael Pietroforte has written about free tools from AMD and Intel which allow administrators to check whether (or not) a computer has the required hardware virtualisation capabilities.
• Michael has also written about a Vista Sidebar gadget that allows monitoring of Hyper-V hosts.
• Matthijs ten Seldam (The author of VMRCplus) is working on a virtual machine import tool for Hyper-V.
• John Howard has written a script for locating Hyper-V hosts in a domain (showing the dramatic growth in Hyper-V usage at Microsoft) and Ben Armstrong has a script for compacting virtual hard disks (if only they had written them in PowerShell - James O'Neill has reworked John's script in PowerShell - as well as posting his PowerShell management Library for Hyper-V on CodePlex).
• Finally, if you're not sure which version of Hyper-V you have running on a host (or in a VM), Sander Berkouwer has a post on determining your Hyper-V version and upgrade method.