I have been some trusty Windows Server 2003 VMs from Virtual Server 2005 across to Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V this week and without fail each of them has given me the boot message "At least one service or driver failed during system startup. Use Event Viewer to examine the event log for details."

Now I expect this when network adaptors have yet to find their drivers as all sorts of things fall over, but even once the devices were all happy and working the prompt persisted - checking the event logs showed that the Parallel port driver service failed to start - I didn't think you could get parallel ports on VMs! :)

Anyhow, thought I'll check the services MMC and disable it - but it was not to be found there. A quick search later revealed some posts suggesting I tweak registry values to stop the service ; but I don't like doing that sort of thing, especially when this one is a DC. So fiddled around with command line options for services and found that the answer is one line in a dos prompt thus:

 sc config parport start= disabled

Simple, by the third VM I managed to remember it without looking at the help!

I came across a blog post  today by Christophe Fiessinger, he outlines a performance comparison between running SharePoint VMs on a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 and a Samsung SSD SATA 3.0Gb/s (Solid State Drive). The warm up time for the web applications were between 2 and 10 times quicker, now that's a lot of wasted time cut out from a developer's day or waiting in a demo situation.

Then, I also spotted the following from Doug McCutcheon with a video clip on youtube and links to discounted Dell laptops for demoing. Looks good, hopefully they'll make the deals available in the UK too.

Since I last posted on this James O'Neill has released an updated version of the library for Hyper V. He's now up to 1.00b over on codeplex.

There are a number of additions and amendments which caught me out initially as a parameter name had changed and caused my script to return all the virtual machines rather than just the one I expected... but the library is more complete and now I'm extending my collection of scripts for making the provisioning of test and staging servers more automated I expect that will be very welcome.

Well, James O'Neill has updated his library on codeplex again, but there is still a function missing that I needed. In our environment we create multiple machines and I wanted a way to create them in a specific directory, now I know I could set the default location and then create it, but I prefer to just specify a path and go from there.

I started from Ben Armstrong's code at Virtual PC Guy's Weblog and then modified the code after the VM name is set to also specify the location of the folder it will be created in.

[code:xml]

# Setthe VM name
$newVSGlobalSettingData.psbase.Properties.Item("ElementName").value = $VMName

# New code - Set Folder location
$VMFolder = "E:\DevVMs\"
$newVSGlobalSettingData.psbase.Properties.Item("ExternalDataRoot").value = $VMFolder + $VMName

[/code]

It took a little while to find the correct property to set, and I don't think that ExternalDataRoot is particularly obvious but the documentation at MSDN was helpful. In the example above, it puts the VM files in E:\DevVMs\VMName.

For our scripts I then used the HyperV Library to configure the VM with CPUs, RAM, disks and network connections.

Managing VMs from PowerShell requires the use of lots of WMI calls but fortunately for us James O'Neill has come to the rescue with a PowerShell script that makes managing HyperV as easy as the rest of PowerShell with straightforward commands like Get-VM. He has produced a PowerShell script much like an include file that you can use to make life easier.

The source is up on codeplex at http://www.codeplex.com/PSHyperv 

And for those who haven't figured out how to do an include in a PowerShell script here you go, you dot source it. Just add the following line to the top of your script.

[code:xml]

. [path to script]\hyperv.ps1

[/code]

Personally I have tinkered and removed the directory listing of all the added functions. Once I got used to the structure of the commands it saved me hundreds of lines of WMI handling and calls. The only task I haven't been able to get it to do is create the VM in a specific directory. I have now manged it with direct WMI calls so I'll go back and try with these extensions either to add to them or use them to manipulate what I need, but that will have to wait for a future post.

I've been continuing to work on our development environment and staging servers looking at ways to automate things and Powershell seems to be the way to go. I found a great collection of functions ready to use that James O Neill has posted to codeplex, but last week I ran into some problems with them. Using the Get-VM function gave me no output as did a number of other get- functions.

It took a while as i gradually worked through the code trying to see where it was going wrong - debugging a new language is always a liitle bit challenging as you learn what the different syntax and constructions do, but very beneficial in terms of learning how it works. Anyhow eventually i got to the point where i could get the WMI objects to return only the host machine and none of the virtual machines. At this point something clicked, I can't remember what it was now, but I realised that I was running powershell under the administrator account but without elevated privileges. I ran a new instance of powershell "as administrator" and pulled in the hyperV.ps1 file. Typed Get-vm and hey presto the list appeared of all my VMs. 

Whilst I appreciate what Microsoft is trying to do with UAC, I am beginning to wonder how many more times i am going to get caught out by it and whether we will all just end up turning it off!

Well, since my last post on WinPE Mike Sterling has blogged how to add the intergration components (the new name for Virtual Machine Additions) to a WinPE image. This means that virtual networking breaks the legacy network adaptor limit of 100MBit and our deployment of images fly through rather than sitting around twiddling their thumbs!

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikester/archive/2008/05/30/using-the-hyper-v-integration-components-in-winpe.aspx 

I only wish i'd thought of it as it's kind of an obvious thing to do to speed things up.

Always hoping to be the first with news. Microsoft has released Hyper-V in its final form. Only the virtualisation site seems to be updated at the moment but the downloads are available from the following knowledge base article:

   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950050

For those of you running RC1 you will be very pleased (and in my case releaved) to see that snapshots and saved states created with RC1 are compatible with the final release version, so you don't need to merge all those changes back to a single image and lose your snapshot trees. We're finding them very useful as we're testing sharepoint deployments and feature development.

Of course we're yet to see if it breaks anything!!!

[Update] Taylor Brown has a good list of all the related updates on his blog here.

We have recently rebuilt our entire development envirnonment and put a lot of shiny new PC's and server. Essentially, we are now working in a complete virtual environment, where our personal development servers, desktops, staging servers etc are all Virtual. Our physical PC's now run Server 2008 and Hyper-V

For those that don't know, Hyper-V is the next generation of Virtual Server and in the development environment give us great control over the server - my favourite being able to take a snapshot of a server at a given point in time, have a tree of these snapshots and being able to merge parts of the tree, or indeed all back into a single virtual disk. These snapshots can be taken at any time - an example being, if I was to install software, snapshot just before the install. If the install fails, revert back to the snapshot.

I'm hoping that Iain will blog about this in more detail very soon (not to Iain - publish these soon!  )

As part of our development process, we need to ensure that the staging servers are clean each time we deploy our code and features. To ensure this, we look to get some scripts to automtically turn off the virtual staging servers, scrap the disks and revert to a known good point (those who know the daily build process will be familiar with this). Rather than start from scratch, Taylor from the MS Hyper-V team has some startpoint scripts