- Posted by ploft on July 3, 2008
As some of you may know the final release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technology has been released. I’ve used the last few weeks reading up on some of the changes and other people’s experiences with Hyper-V. I tried the Hyper-V then it was still in beta and at this time it was clear that Microsoft had made a great product – and I’m saying this, with a slight chance of being called a Microsoft-fan boy, but the specs I’ve seen with Hyper-V should really kick ass.
We’d talked about the possibility of running all our virtual machines and pc’s of a dedicated host-server rather than using them locally on the development workstations where I work. No further detail should be needed, and to make a long story short we decided to take it up for a test, so a HP ProLiant DL 185 was ordered for this purpose.
I will be configuring the machine as follows:
System drive will consist of 2 x 160 gigs SATA drives in Raid 1
Data drive will be running Raid 5 on 6 x 160 gigs SATA drives
I will be installing the Core version of Windows 2008, since this machine is only to be hosting virtual machines, and the idea of a operation system with a small footprint and almost no need for updates (and thereby reboots) is a quite appealing. This would also make it possible to allocate more power to the virtual machines and not the host system.
First step of installing the Windows 2008 Core 64-bit version is straight forward since the install lets you choose this option. After the install completes I made the following steps so the server fits our environment;
- IP-addresses (I used DHCP because I’m lazy – so I actually skipped this step)
- Renaming the server (followed by a reboot)
- Joining the server to our domain
- Enable Remote Desktop
- Disabling the servers firewall (as this server already is behind a physical firewall)
I came about a freeware tool called CoreConfigurator developed by Guy Teverovsky, that does adds some GUI to your Core version of Windows 2008. “Huh” you might say, but this small tool offers only the most basic things you have to configure every time you do a Windows 2008 Core setup. I would have used this for my testing environment, but the links I found relating to CoreConfigurator was dead, so I did my configuration the “old”-fashion-way.
Renaming server:
netdom RenameComputer [server-name] /newname:win-core01
Need to reboot:
shutdown /r /t 0
Joining the company domain:
netdom Join [server-name] /domain:peter.local /UserD:Administrator /PasswordD:******
(and yes, both User- and Password is followed by an extra “d” – it’s not a typo)
And if you know how much noise rackservers put out you’d properly be ready for enabling the remote desktop right about now, using these to commands:
CScript %windir%\system32\SCRegEdit.wsf /ar 0
(enables Remote Desktop)
CScript %windir%\system32\SCRegEdit.wsf /cs 0
(makes it possible for OS earlier than Vista also to connect to the Remote Desktop)
Disabling the server firewall:
netsh firewall set opmode disable
And about now it would be a good idea to reboot the machine once again with the shutdown /r /t 0 command.
In the meanwhile I downloaded the Microsoft Hyper-V Management Tools:
Microsoft Hyper-V Management Tools from BetaNews.com (32-bit)
Microsoft Hyper-V Management Tools from BetaNews.com (64-bit)
For some reason the toolset isn’t available for downloads right now from the Microsoft site, the many times I’ve tried I just get the “We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found” but if the downloads come up again the links are:
Microsoft Hyper-V Management Tools from Microsoft (32-bit)
Microsoft Hyper-V Management Tools from Micorsoft (64-bit)
After installing the management tools, I opened up the mmc and added the hyper-v management tool and disk management snap-ins. After I formatted our raid 5-set I had about 750 gigabytes of space for my virtual machines and seconds later I had my first virtual machine running an installation of Windows Server on the guest system.
There was a couple of small gotcha’s that I wasn’t aware of when I was reading how other people experienced their Core-environments. One of them was the remote management tools only works from a Vista (with SP1 installed and of course the management tools), not that big of a deal but you should be aware of that.
Another thing was the remote Disk Management tool – and this is not that well documented – but it didn’t work without the firewall ports for RPC being open in both ends. I kept getting “RPC is unavailable”.
Oh... another gotcha... I was trying to connect from my laptop to our virtual host via the Hyper-V management tools, I kept getting "Access denied. Unable to establish communication between Client and Server". By default the Windows Vista doesn’t allow remote connections to our DCOM connection on our client machine (WMI uses this and thereby also Hyper-V management tools). More details on this can be found on John Howard’s blog (Senior Program Manager at the Microsoft Hyper-V team).
In short terms we need to open the Components Services MMC.
1. You can do this by typing: ”DCOMCNFG” in the run-command in Windows.
2. Browse trough to: “Component Services > Computers > My Computer”.
3. Open Properties for “My Computer” and select the COM Security tab.
4. In “Access Permissions” area click the “Edit Limits”-button.
5. Select the “Anonymous Logon”-group and make sure the “Remote Access” is set to Allowed.
Now you client tools should connect successfully to the servers Hyper-V management.
This is first part of me journey into the world of Hyper-V and the Core edition of Windows 2008. I’ll will be doing a follow up when I have time to test this environment some more and hopefully include some speed tests.
Just a couple of links for great information about Windows Hyper-V:
Supported guest systems:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-supported-guest-os.aspx
Virtual PC Guy's WebLog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/