CoreConfigurator is a great tool to easily configure Windows Server Core using a simple GUI. The CoreConfigurator tool has now been updated with a couple of new functions:

• Windows Update configuration
• Windows Server Backup performance setting: full or incremental backups

Download the new version here.

Hyper-V RC1 is available for download. More info can be found here. A couple of things to note:

• Saved-state files and online snapshots are different so discard these before upgrading.
• The current SCVMM 2008 Beta does not support RC1.
• There is support for Windows 2000 SP4 guests.
• Integration Components disk (iso) contain the binaries needed for all Windows guest operating systems including Windows Server 2008.
• Static IPv4 migration when you create a virtual network bound to an adapter with an existing fixed IPv4 address.

While we are on the subject of Hyper-V, check out the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog. It contains a couple of interesting posts including some more WMI examples.

I stumbled across two configuration issues with the beta of SCVMM 2008 (available on http://connect.microsoft.com). Here they are:

1. SCVMM does not like : in a path

I use local storage on my ESX server and ESX automatically gives that storage a label in the form of hostname:storage#. When I tried to deploy a virtual machine to ESX with SCVMM, it failed saying that the volume name was not recognized. Removing the : in the label solved the issue.

2. Issue with USB flash devices in Hyper-V host

When I added my Hyper-V host to SCVMM everything seemed to work fine except the Refresh-Host job. It turns out that in the beta, that job fails when you have USB flash devices in the system. Because I use an HP Desktop machine with built-in card readers, I had to disable them all in device manager. After disabling those devices, Refresh-Host completed without errors, making the Hyper-V host available for deployments.