Sam Winstanley’s Blog

It’s been about 2 weeks since I got my Hyper-V environment up and running so I’ll take the opportunity to post about my continued (positive) experiences with the software..

Just to give a little background, I had a very old and potentially quite broken Windows 2003 server doing vital things. I bought a new HP ML110 G5 server, installed Windows 2008 on it and Hyper-V then I did what is known as a P2V to move my 2003 server into a virtual server on my windows 2008 machine.

After much deliberation I decided to add the active directory role to my Hyper-V host.. this was because the Windows 2003 (now) virtual server and I had a potential concern about recovery and the general issue that the host really has to be a domain member, otherwize you can’t use things like the the Hyper-V Remote Console will not work. This is a kind of chicken and egg problem, the DC could never be up before the server that needed it was. This was actually not that easy, but I probably could have read documentation better. After much use of ADProp I completed this task and I don’t think my server is worse off for it as the only roles on this server are Hyper-V and Active directory it still feels quite pure and recoverable.

I’ve had a lot of deliberation with respect to backup strategies… currently I use Acronis to back up the Virtual servers from the inside, which means making old-style partition images. My reason for taking this strategy is that I’m still a bit nervous of VHD’s (virtual hard disks) in-case I ended up backing up a corrupted one. Wheras I have much-faith in Acronis and if I need to I can turn its TIB files into VHD’s as well.

Performance has been excellent, and I now have 3 virtual machines always running in my server along with Windows XP test machines which I start on demand. I’ve had no failures of any kind everything has been extremely stable.

In general I’m finding my windows 2008 experience a very pleasent one and I am still trying to get to grips with Windows 2008 server core and now have a working IIS/App virtual server which uses Windows Server core, I would have totally failed at this if it wasn’t for the REALLY GREAT DOCUMENTATION HERE so huge thanks to Dan Petri.

Througout my Hyper-V experience I’ve found the following other resources very vital:

• Windows Virtualization Team Blog
• John Howard’s Blog
• Ben Armstron’s Blog
• Mike Sterling’s Blog
• The technet Hyper-V forum (currently closed but probably will open again)