Looks like Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell are up to their old tricks again, with an awesome new tool called Disk2VHD.

From the web site:

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).

Disk2VHD can run on Windows XP SP2 and higher, as well as Windows Server 2003 and higher.

Awesome work, Mark and Bryce!

:: Yawn ::  No big news here.  Microsoft just released the Hyper-V Integration Component drivers for Linux. As Open Source.  Under the GPL v2.

Yup.  Just another standard, run of the mill… wait, what?

 

No, seriously.  It’s true.  This is the first time that Microsoft has contributed code to the Linux kernel. 

Check out the post on the Virtualization blog over here, or go straight to the press release here.

 

Please keep in mind, though, that the only Linux distributions that we *support* are SLES 10 SP2, SLES 11, RHEL 5.2 and RHEL 5.3.  That doesn’t mean that these drivers only work on those platforms, just that you can only get support for them if you’re running those distributions.

 

(And yes – I’m working on another podcast.  I’ve been very, very busy lately so I don’t have a lot of spare time to work with.  Stay tuned.)

Of course you do.  And in this episode of the Virtualization Nation Podcast, I’ll show you how. 

But first, a little background.

Earlier today, I posted a description of the new Native VHD integration in Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 on the Windows Virtualization Team blog, along with a link to a nifty little Powershell script called Install-WindowsImage.ps1 which I’ll talk about some other time.  The main point of that post was to start getting the word out about Native VHD Boot.

So, what’s so special about this?

Well, put yourself in the shoes of a corporate network administrator (though, when I was a network admin, I didn’t wear shoes all that often).  It’s really very common for a company to have a “base” Operating System image that they can apply to a server or workstation.  This image is usually tweaked with some software and/or patches installed, or is specially configured in some other way.

If that’s the case, it’s possible that you would need to maintain two (or more) images: one for virtual machines (probably a VHD), and one for physical machines (maybe a WIM or a Ghost file).

With Native VHD Boot, you can finally have one, single base image that works everywhere.  Your VHD can be booted in virtual machines, just like it always did, and it can also be used to boot your physical servers. 

Ok, let’s get right to the heart of this thing.

To boot from a VHD, you need the following things:

• A physical machine with the Windows 7 boot loader on it.
• A VHD with a SKU of Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 (Enterprise and Ultimate only – sorry), or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

Now, you’ve got those things ready, right?  You’re all set?  You’ve read the VHD FAQ? Cool. 

Ok.  You can find instructions on how to configure your computer on various web pages and videos, but they all seem pretty lengthy.

Want something simple?  Something easy to remember?

Of course you do.

You can watch me run through the steps in the video below, or download it here.

For those of you who don’t want to download a video for a “simple” command, here are the Cliff’s Notes:

1. Get to an elevated or WinPE command prompt.
2. Use your favorite VHD-creation method to install Windows in a VHD.
3. Use DiskPart or DiskMgmt.msc to attach your VHD as a drive on your computer, and give it a drive letter (V:\ for example).
4. Run BCDBOOT.EXE  V:\Windows
5. Sit back, relax, and reboot your computer to start booting into your new OS.

Important Notes:

1. If you’re booting to a Dynamically Expanding VHD, make sure that you have enough room on your physical disk to hold the VHD as if it were fully expanded to its maximum size.  If you don’t have enough space, you’ll get a bugcheck during boot.
2. Hibernation is disabled when booted to a VHD.
3. You can’t boot to a VHD that lives on a network share or a removable storage device.

It was my New Years Resolution that I’d do an average of 2 blog posts per week this year.  So far, I haven’t been doing a very good job of that, but I think I have a good excuse.  I’ve been very busy with preparing to release a new tool, and now, I can finally announce it.

Fine citizens of the Virtualization Nation: I present to you the Windows® Image to Virtual Hard Disk Converter, or WIM2VHD as I like to call it.

WIM2VHD is a tool that will create a bootable VHD from a specified Windows 7 or 2008 R2 WIM image (like the INSTALL.WIM file that ships on the installation DVDs) without having to run Windows Setup.  That means that you can a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine up and running much, much faster.

You can use these VHDs in Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Hyper-V, and … some other things, too.  We’ll talk more about that later.

You can get WIM2VHD here. 

I’ve done my best at creating some good documentation for WIM2VHD, which is available from the link above.  Please make sure that you read the docs.  If you have any questions, feel free to start a discussion thread at the WIM2VHD site.

Here’s a video I made introducing WIM2VHD, and showing it in action.  More are one the way.

Please be aware, however, that while the underlying process of creating the VHDs is supported by Microsoft, WIM2VHD is not.

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