Earlier this week, John Howard alerted the world of the availability of “NVSPBind”.  This is a handy command line tool that allows you to edit the network protocol bindings on a virtual network adapter (note, it does not work if you are not using virtual networks).  This is very useful if you are running Hyper-V Server or Hyper-V on a Windows Server core installation.

Over the weekend, I attempted to reconfigure some of the drives in my Hyper-V server at home.  Note that I said “attempted”.  I ran into hardware issues and ended up having to revert back to my old configuration - but somehow in all of this – I broke my system disk. Specifically it would not boot any more. This did not phase me because I knew that the excellent startup repair tool in Windows would soon have me up and running – which it did.

If you have been wondering where I have been, I have been on holiday for the last four weeks, visiting friends and family in sunny Australia.  But now I am back in cold, rainy, dark Seattle – so I should have plenty of time to get blogging.

The Remote Desktop team just did an interesting post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/2009/12/15/remoteapp-for-hyper-v.aspx About the RemoteApp for Hyper-V functionality that is available with Windows Server 2008 R2. 

Today if you want to compact a virtual hard disk – you can use Virtual PC / Virtual Server / Hyper-V or Windows 7.  But not all methods are the same.  Under the covers there are two different approaches that are taken to compacting virtual hard disks: Virtual PC / Virtual Server: Perform a blind “block level” compaction.  Here the virtual hard disk is inspected at a block level, and when a block is found which is full of zeroes, the block is removed from the virtual hard disk.

Core Configurator 2.0 is now available for download here: http://coreconfig.codeplex.com/
If you are unfamiliar with this tool – it is a graphical tool that allows you to configure a whole bunch of system settings on a Windows Server Core installation:

Under Hyper-V we have two kinds of disk controller that you can add to a virtual machine – IDE disks and SCSI disks.  A rough list of the differences between these controllers is as follows: IDE:

• Works on operating systems without integration services installed / available
• Can be used to boot a virtual machine

SCSI:

Tore Lervik has released an updated version of his fantastic Hyper-V Monitor Gadget.  New features in this release include:

In the past I have talked about the different configuration options when running Domain Controllers and Hyper-V.  One of the more interesting configurations I discussed then was having a Hyper-V server joined to a domain where the domain controller was a virtual machine running on the same instance of Hyper-V.
This is actually a configuration I use all of the ti

A while ago we announced that Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2 would support booting off of a USB flash device.  We have now provided detailed documentation on how to set this up.  Even cooler than booting Hyper-V off of a USB device – is the fact that what we are doing is booting a VHD with Hyper-V installed on it off of a USB device: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee731893(WS.10).aspx