If, for some reason, you want to boot Windows Server 2008 without the hypervisor you can create an extra entry in the boot loader. Here's how:

1. At the command prompt, type the following:
   bcdedit /copy {default} /d "No Hypervisor"
   
2. The above command should say: The entry was successfully copied to {guid}. Copy that guid to the clipboard including the curly braces.
   
3. Now, type the following command:
   bcdedit /set {guid} hypervisorlaunchtype off
   
   In the above command, replace {guid} with what you copied in step 2. The above command just sets a property in the boot entry that will not load the hypervisor on boot.

That's it. If you now boot your machine you will get a boot menu with an extra option.

Now why would you do it? Troubleshooting is one reason but for test/dev/training purposes you might want to run something like Virtual Server or VMware Server/Workstation on the same box. Running those with the hypervisor turned on will give you all sorts of problems: it will be slow, you won't be able to run x64 guests in VMware, etc...

If you are testing Windows Server 2008 in a virtual environment you probably get tired of answering setup prompts after each new template gets deployed. Although you can use sysprep as with Windows Server 2003, the answer file for sysprep has changed quite a bit.

The answer file is now an XML file instead of an INF file. In the past, you could generate the answer file with setupmgr.exe but that cannot be done with Windows Server 2008. Instead, you will need to use Windows System Image Manager to create the XML file. Windows System Image Manager is part of WAIK and can be downloaded here. Although much more powerful, Windows System Image Manager is not as easy to use as setupmgr.exe.

The XML file I generated with Windows System Image Manager is very basic but enough to do the job of automating sysprep. Here it is for x86 and nl-be regional settings:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend">
    <settings pass="specialize">
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <ComputerName>*</ComputerName>
            <ProductKey>AAAAA-BBBBB-CCCCC-DDDDD-EEEEE</ProductKey>
            <RegisteredOrganization>Org</RegisteredOrganization>
            <RegisteredOwner>Org</RegisteredOwner>
            <ShowWindowsLive>false</ShowWindowsLive>
        </component>
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Security-Licensing-SLC-UX" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <SkipAutoActivation>true</SkipAutoActivation>
        </component>
    </settings>
    <settings pass="oobeSystem">
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-International-Core" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <InputLocale>nl-be</InputLocale>
            <SystemLocale>nl-be</SystemLocale>
            <UILanguage>en-us</UILanguage>
            <UserLocale>nl-be</UserLocale>
        </component>
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <OOBE>
                <HideEULAPage>true</HideEULAPage>
                <NetworkLocation>Work</NetworkLocation>
                <ProtectYourPC>1</ProtectYourPC>
                <SkipUserOOBE>true</SkipUserOOBE>
            </OOBE>
            <RegisteredOrganization>Org</RegisteredOrganization>
            <RegisteredOwner>Org</RegisteredOwner>
        </component>
    </settings>
</unattend>

To actually use this XML file, you copy it to your template. I copied mine as sysprep.xml to c:\windows\system32\sysprep. That is the folder on a Windows Server 2008 system where sysprep.exe is located by default. From that location, you execute the following command:

sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown /unattend:sysprep.xml

The system will shut down. The next time you start this system (or better a copy of it), it will ask you nothing and install with the settings in the XML file. The computername will be automatically generated.

Update: if you want to use this unattend file on an x64 system, replace x86 with amd64.

When you install Hyper-V on a system and you select a network adapter for virtual machines some changes will be made to your configuration. Before installation of Hyper-V, I had the following connection:

I had only one adapter because I used a standard HP desktop. The adapter was configured with a static IP. During installation, I chose the above adapter for virtual machine networking (click to enlarge):

After the reboot when the installation is complete, the network adapter configuration changes. In my case:

Local Area Connection is the same as before. It represents the physical network adapter in the system. But the configuration only has the Microsoft Virtual Network Switch Protocol configured. IPv4 and other configuration settings are not active anymore:

The Local Area Connection 3 adapter is actually a virtual adapter that is available to the parent partition (the actual installed operating system running on top of the hypervisor) for management. You set the IP address for your physical machine there. This virtual adapter is actually bridged over Local Area Connection just like a virtual machine.

When you disable the network adapter that represents the physical adapter (Local Area Connection in my case), virtual machines and the parent partition will lose connectivity. When you disable only the virtual network adapter of the parent partition (Local Area Connection 3 in my case), you will lose network access to the parent partition but your virtual machines will still have access to the network. This is because they still have their virtual interface bridged over the physical adapter.

After installing a virtual machine from the same media as Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V beta 1, I noticed that the integration components were already installed. Device manager showed the following devices:

The list of services on the server had the Hyper-V services already running:

There is no need to install the integration components from the Action menu:

I installed Windows Server 2008 x64 with Hyper-V Beta 1 on an HP Desktop and installed the Hyper-V role from Server Manager. Everything worked fine and the machine rebooted properly after installation. The role was available but the Virtual Machine Management service refused to start. It threw the following error: "Error 87: The parameter is incorrect".

The reason for the error seems to be that you need to install Windows Server 2008 using the US English locale. I chose Dutch - Belgium during the installation and that results in the error above. The solution came from here.

Mike Laverick has done it again. He has written a great guide about the new features of VI 3.5. Take a look here for download links.

A couple of things I learned from the guide that I did not read anywhere else:

• Virtual disks can now be enlarged from VI Client. No need for vmkfstools.
• Power-on boot delay for guests and an option to boot directly in the BIOS after a guest reboot.
• You can set a static MAC address for a guest from the VI Client.
• The new datastore browser allows you to upload files to and from the datastore.
• You can configure time synch with NTP from VI Client.

There is much more in the guide so I urge you to read it. Great stuff and thanks Mike!!!

Go and take a look at the download page for Windows Server 2008 RC1. It contains a link to a version with Hyper-V Beta. The Windows Server Division weblog has more details about the release.

Some critical new features in this release are:

• Support for quick migration and cluster HA (16 nodes).
• Installation from Server Manager.
• Support for running on Server Core!
• VSS support.
• 64 GB of memory for a VM (just like in ESX 3.5).

Integration components are available for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (x86 and x64). Integration components for Linux are available in beta form.

Quite a surprising release. Everybody was expecting this only at the release of Windows Server 2008 in February.

The release of ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 brings a lot of interesting features. A good overview can be found in the release notes and more information in a what's new document.

Some of the changes I like in this release are:

• Integration of tools like Guided Consolidation and VMware Converter in the VI Client.
• Image customization of 64-bit guests. This is probably still based on the sysprep format for Windows Server 2003 and earlier. Remember that Vista and Windows Server 2008 use a different format (xml-based).
• Provisioning across datacenters. In previous versions, you had to have templates in each datacenter.
• Datastore browser that supports file sharing between hosts. You will be able to just cut and paste files between ESX hosts. Seems like a basic feature to have but in the past you had to do this from the console.
• Support for 256GB of RAM in the ESX host and 64GB of RAM for a guest. Interesting but I doubt there will be many customers who need more than 16GB for a guest. Gotta run the race though. ;-)
• Lockdown mode: the ability to prohibit management of a host when it is already managed by VirtualCenter.
• Limit the amount of remote console connections.

For our customers, the features of most interest will probably be:

• Update Manager: provides a patching solution for ESX hosts and (some) guests. This includes offline patching. Microsoft is also working on an offline patching solution with codename "Himalaya". See virtualization.info for more information. It will be interesting to see how the two stack up to eachother.
• Storage VMotion: the ability to migrate virtual machines from one LUN to another without downtime. The migration needs to be done on the same host. You just present the source and target LUN and off you go.
• VMware Converter integration into VI Client: makes it easier to do V2V and P2V right from VI Client and also allows customers that use VCB to restore backed up virtual machines right from VI Client.

Windows Integrity Levels (or WIC) is a system that can label an object with an integrity level. There are six such levels:

1. Trusted Installer
2. System
3. High
4. Medium
5. Low
6. Untrusted

WIC is available on Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Mark Minasi has an interesting article about it and a tool that allows you to work with these levels. The tool, chml, has more options than the built-in icacls.exe command. Check out the article here.

Microsoft have released XP SP3 Release Candidate (RC) and Windows Server 2008 RC1. You can download both from MSDN and Technet.

Windows XP SP3 contains mainly bugfixes and a lot of previously released enhancements for XP like MMC 3.0, MSXML 6, BITS 2.5 and WPA2. There are some new features as well:

• Network Access Protection (NAP): also available in Vista and enforced using Windows Server 2008 infrastructure such as DHCP and NAP.
• Windows Product Activation: it is not necessary to provide a product key during installation of a full, integrated installation of Windows XP SP3.

More information can be found here.

A feature that is not available is SSTP or Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol. Next to PPTP and LT2P/IPSec it is a VPN protocol but all traffic is tunneled through an SSL connection over port 443. Windows Server 2008 RRAS provides the server-side of SSTP tunneling and Vista SP1 contains the SSTP client portion. But XP SP3 does not seem to contain this feature yet.

Windows Server 2008 RC1 has one big new feature called Group Policy Preferences. Kurt Roggen has already blogged about it here and his blogpost clearly shows what the feature can do. Other info can be found on the Windows Server Division Weblog.