The other day, Ben Armstrong posted the steps for installing Windows PowerShell on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.  How awesome is that?  A real, modern, powerful shell on Hyper-V Server!

It should be noted that this also works on Windows Server 2008 R2 Core SKUs, so if you’re running Hyper-V on one of those, you can also use this trick.

So why is this cool?

Well, first of all, if you install PowerShell on a Server Core SKU, you can use a new and more powerful tool for installing and configuring server roles and features.

To do this, you need to load the Server Manager module into your shell with the following command:

Import-Module ServerManager

You can get a list of the new cmdlets that this module provides by running:

Get-Module ServerManager

So, if you’re on a Windows Server SKU, you can install all of your roles or features this way.  To install Hyper-V, you would use this command:

Add-WindowsFeature Hyper-V

Ok, that’s cool and all, but it’s not that spectacular.  So how about being able to actually interact with Hyper-V from this shell?  Even on Server Core or Hyper-V Server 2008 R2?

Check out James O’Neill’s PSHyperV project over on CodePlex.  If you download this library, you can interact with Hyper-V directly from your Core console. 

The first thing to remember is that you need to dot-source the HyperV.ps1 script so that all of the functions remain in memory, like so:

. .\hyperv.ps1

After you do that, you’ll get a list of all of the new functions and filters that this library provides.  Just as an example, you can create and configure a VM with these commands:

$vm = New-VM -name “MyVM”
Set-VMMemory -vm $vm -memory 2GB
Set-VMCPUCount -vm $vm -CPUCount 2
# some other logic to create a hard drive, or attach an existing one.
Start-VM -vm $vm -wait

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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Ever wonder what a Microsoft ship party looks like?

If you take a stroll through Microsoft’s Redmond campus on Google Street View, you’ll get to see one.  On the day that Google decided to drive through campus, we were celebrating the RTM of Hyper-V.  It was a beautiful summer day, and we were out on the sports fields enjoying it.

In fact, you can even see me (highlighted in a yellow halo of awesomeness):

A friend of mine from another group came to me with a problem he’s been having on some Windows Server 2003 guests.

They’re doing some nifty stuff with the .NET Stopwatch() class, and some WPF animations, which uses the QueryPerformanceCounter Win32 API to figure out the timing during the animations.  Apparently, when they run their code in Hyper-V, the animations look sort of… not good.

They’re using Windows Server 2003 SP2 x86, which has been allocated two virtual processors.

It turns out that our performance guru, Tony Voellm, has already encountered something like this.  From Tony’s blog post:

The root issue comes about from the Win32 QueryPerformanceCounter function.  By default it uses a time source called the TSC.  This is a CPU time source that essentially counts CPU cycles.  The TSC for each (virtual) processor can be different so there is no guarantee that reading TSC on one processor has anything to do with reading TSC on another processor.  This means back to back reads of TSC on different VP's can actually go backwards. Hyper-V guarantees that TSC will not go backwards on a single VP.

The fix for this is to modify the guest’s BOOT.INI file by adding the /USEPMTIMER switch to your operating system’s boot entry.  This tells the system to use a different timer for QueryPerformanceCounter-related tasks, and should alleviate the problem.

This isn’t exactly on topic for this blog, since up to this point I’ve really only talked about getting Windows Vista running in a VM, but sometimes it’s nice to talk about something else for a change.

One of the things that I like most about Virtual Machines is that they let me play with other operating systems besides Windows without having to have a dedicated computer risk its well-being for the task.  If something doesn’t work in a VM, then a quick click of a button and it’s gone.

One of the other operating systems I’ve been playing around with lately is Ubuntu Linux. 

There have been a good number of blog posts about getting Ubuntu working under VPC, but I haven’t found any of them to be totally comprehensive, so I wanted to do one that encompases all of the issues that I’ve had getting it running.  Please keep in mind that I am certainly not an expert in Linux - I really only know enough to get myself into trouble, but not necessarily back out.  Also, I didn’t come up with most of the tips here myself - thanks to ArcaneCode for a series of posts about the mouse issues, culminating with indianabeck’s tip about the boot parameter.  And thanks to my friend Marc Teale who helped me figure out how to fix the video problem, and taught me the fundamentals of actually using Linux and editing the configuration files. And also to Microsoft’s own Ben Armstrong, who pointed me to ArcaneCode in the first place.

• So, the first step, obviously, is to get a Windows PC with Virtual PC 2007 installed.  I’m running the x64 version on Windows Vista Ultimate.  Download the ISO for Ubuntu in whatever fashion you choose - just remember that Virtual PC only supports 32-bit guests, so make sure you grab the i386 version.  Also, you don’t need the alternate installer version.  Just grab the regular one.
• Start Virtual PC, create a VM with the specifications you want, and boot it.  During POST, click the CD menu, and capture the Ubuntu ISO you just downloaded.  You may need to reset the VM to get it to boot properly.
• On the Ubuntu boot menu, select Start or install Ubuntu and hit F6.  Add i8042.noloop to the end of the line, and press Enter.  This will make the mouse work in recent versions of the kernel. 
• When Ubuntu boots to the Live CD and XWindows loads, the graphics will be… not good.  You’re going to need to change the color depth to make it display correctly.  To do that:

• Hit CTRL-ALT-F1 to drop to a console. 
• Type sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf and press Enter. 
• Press CTRL W, type depth and press Enter.  You should see a line that says “DefaultDepth 24″.  Delete 24 and type 16. 
• Press CTRL O, and press Enter to save the file. 
• Press CTRL X to exit the nano editor. 
• Press CTRL-ALT-F7 to switch back to XWindows - that graphics will still not be right.
• Press CTRL-ALT-Backspace to reload XWindows.  The graphics should be good to go now.

• Boot into Ubuntu on the hard drive.
• Hit CTRL-ALT-F1 to drop to a console and log in.
• Type sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst.
• Press CTRL W and type end default options, then press Enter.
• The first entry in the list below is the entry containing the information to boot Ubuntu in regular mode.  Find the line that starts with kernel and go all the way to the end of it.  At the end, type i8042.noloop, press CTRL O, and press Enter to save.
• At this point, you can do the same with the other entries, like the recovery mode one if you care enough to bother.  If not, just hit CTRL X to exit nano.
• Type sudo reboot to reboot the VM. 
• The next time you boot into XWindows, your mouse should work without issue.  (You should also note that if you happen to upgrade your kernel version, you’ll need to make this change *again*.)