Doing IT Virtual

I’ve been waiting for a nice high-end quad-core laptop that can be used as a serious test machine for my Hyper-V work. Well, Dell came through with such a sweet discount that I did not have to wait any longer to order one of their new Precision M6400 with the Intel QX9300 2.53 GHz, 1067 MHz, with 12 MB of L2 cache. I should receive it by mid-December, and will be waiting anxiously for it. I chose it above the M4400 for it’s ability to expand to 16 GB of RAM, which I plan to configure as soon as the 4 GB chips become available within a reasonable price range.

If anyone has already started to work with one of these, I’d love to hear your experiences. When I have it up and running and beefed up with an extra disk and additional memory, I’ll post about it and how it performs running Hyper-V.

If you are interested in Hyper-V snapshots, check out the short video that I created for VirtualizationAdmin.com. In it I quickly run through how to create a snapshot, review the directory structure and files that are created, and show how to use the revert feature.

Check it out at http://virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/videos/microsoft-hyper-v-articles/general/using-hyper-v-snapshots.html.

If you have not found them yet, there is a series of five videos on the technet site that you might like to watch. These videos represent a set of interviews with several Windows Virtualization program managers that cover a range of topics including the Hyper-V architecture, high-availability, storage, snapshots, and so on. Here is a list of the video titles and URLs:

Hyper-V Part 1 - Architecture - Interview with PMs

Hyper-V Part 2 - VM Snapshots - Interviews with PMs

Hyper-V Part 3 - TAP and VSS Snapshots - Interview with PMs 

Hyper-V Part 4 - Disks and iSCSI - Interview with PMs

Hyper-V Part 5 - High Availability - Interview with PMs

Enjoy!

Quick update on the book - we encountered some delays, but about 1/3 of the book is now complete. The release date has been moved to April 2009. Here is the link: http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/11842.aspx.

If there are any scenarios or information that you can't find, shoot me an email or post a comment with details. We have lots of content, but always looking for areas that are causing day-to-day problems or unanswered questions.