As you may have heard, we've shipped Hyper-V RC0.  Sorry for the lack of posts - it seems like I'm always on vacation when we ship a major release like this, so my posts lag a few days behind.

Installing Hyper-V isn't exactly a difficult task, but if you have to do it on multiple machines, installing Windows, installing Hyper-V and then applying the RC0 patch can be a bit time consuming.   The purpose of this series of posts is to offer a few different ways to help you speed up your Hyper-V deployments.

Here are the major topics I'm planning to post about:

• Sysprep and Hyper-V
• Unattended Installation of Windows and Hyper-V RC0
• Integrated Installation - The Beauty of the Win6 servicing stack

If you've got any other suggestions for topics, please let me know.

In an earlier post, I said that you should install Windows Server 2008 RC1 with Hyper-V Beta if you’re getting error 61658 while trying to install the Integration Components in Windows Server 2003.

And you should.

But some people are still seeing it.  If you happen to be one of them, here’s why:

You probably didn’t really install Windows Server 2008 RC1 with Hyper-V Beta; you probably installed Windows Server 2008 RC1, which contained the Hyper-V CTP.

I won’t go into the reason behind having two similarly named releases so close together because I wasn’t involved in that discussion, so any attempt to explain it would be pure speculation on my part.  Needless to say, the situation we find ourselves in is that there is a Windows Server 2008 that has our beta bits in it, and one that has our old CTP bits.

If you’ve yet to

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To continue my "here’s why" series of posts, I figured I’d talk about something else that a lot of our users have run into - the infamous disappearing mouse when you try to use a Hyper-V guest while TS’d (that’s Terminal Services - or Remote Desktop) into the host machine.

Here’s the scenario:  You’ve got a VM that you need to use, so you TS into your host machine, start up the Hyper-V Management Tool, connect to your VM and try to use it.  Suddenly, your mouse doesn’t work anymore, so you try to release it using the CTRL-ALT-Left Arrow hotkey.  That doesn’t work.  Now you can’t even use the mouse on your host operating system.

If you close your TS session and restart it, you get your mouse back, but this happens each time you try to control your guest.

Some of you are probably saying "Yes - that happens to me all the time, and it’s annoying!"  Others may think I’m making it up, since they’ve never

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I’ve seen a lot of users having issues with installing the Hyper-V Integration Components on Windows Server 2003 in the last few days.  The error code seems to differ slightly, but it’s usually similar to the message below:

If you’re seeing this error message, it’s because you’re still using the Hyper-V CTP release, and the certificate that was used to digitally sign the driver catalogs for the CTP Integration Components expired back in November.

The solution isn’t very elegant - you have to install Windows Server 2008 RC1 with Hyper-V Beta. 

It’s also important to note that it is not supported to move VMs created with

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I’ve been watching the comments - both internally and externally - about yesterday’s launch of the Hyper-V Beta (yes, I know I’m on vacation, but this is exciting to watch), and I thought I’d list the answers to a few commonly asked questions.

1. Q:  How do I install Hyper-V on my 32-bit server?
   A:  You don’t.  Hyper-V is 64-bit only, and requires that you have an Intel or AMD processor with Virtualization extensions (Intel calls their’s VT, AMD calls their’s AMD-V).
2. Q:  How do I manage Hyper-V remotely?
   A:  It’s not terribly easy to do with the beta.  If you’re running Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V Beta on another machine besides your Hyper-V server, you can use the MMC Management Console to connect to your Hyper-V server remotely (which, in fact, you *must* do if your server is running Server Core). 

   If you’ve only got one server, you can use Terminal Services to connect to your Hyper-V server and run the MMC Management Console - though, you’ll run into issues controlling the Virtual Machines with VMConnect if you don’t have the Integration Components installed. 

   You can also use WMI calls to manage a Hyper-V server remotely.  The

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The bits are available here:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8F22F69E-D1AF-49F0-8236-2B742B354919&displaylang=en

There has been a lot of progress made on Hyper-V since the Tech Preview that shipped with Server RC0 and RC1.  The entire system is much more stable and performant.  Even better, installing Hyper-V is now a great deal easier.  You no longer need to apply any hotfixes (those pesky .MSU files from RC0 and RC1) before you install Hyper-V - it’s now fully integrated into the Role Management tool from the start. 

Secondly, installing Windows Server 2008 in a Hyper-V VM is now a much better experience.  The Integration Components are now part of Windows Server 2008 and are installed automatically in a Hyper-V VM. 

Last, but certainly not least, installation of the Hyper-V role is now available on Server Core.

I’ll post more information about the new Beta release later on, so stay tuned!

[Mike is on vacation, so posts and responses will likely be delayed.]