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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Well, it looks like I was too slow in getting my posts written, because a bunch of people have beaten me to the punch.

Ben Armstrong – also known as the Virtual PC Guy – wrote a post about getting Windows 7 working on Hyper-V.

Similarly, Brian Keller posted about getting Windows 7 running under Virtual PC 2007 SP1.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to be faster next time.

Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan (who’s office is about 5 doors down from mine… I wonder if he can hear me yelling at my test machines) have just started a new blog called Engineering Windows 7. 

There isn’t a lot of information over there right now, just a few introductory posts outlining the rules and the purpose of the blog, but I’d imagine that there will be some pretty good information going up on that blog as we approach WinHEC and PDC 2008.

If you’re interested in Windows 7, you should probably add this blog to your RSS aggregator.

Stay tuned here, as well.  Once we get some information about Seven out there, I’ll be posting talking about it and how it relates to Virtualization.

Fun times are ahead, everyone.