My past few weeks have been frustrating - dealing with virtual issues. I needed to get a way to run a 64-bit Win 2008 guest OS to support some work I'm doing on some COOL new things - let your imagination run wild! :) Anyway, that requirement boiled down to Hyper-V or booting from a VHD (with Win 7 or Win 2008 OS). I managed to get my main desktop able to boot from the VHD - so success there. No such joy on my laptop that I had upgraded RAM to 8 GB of RAM in anticipation of being able to access most of it from a virtual. So Plan B - installed Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop, enabled the Hyper-V role and voila! - I was able to run the 64-bit guest OS. I deluded myself that everything was hunky-dory.
Then I needed to give a demo that I'd done before - of the SharePoint BI stack and how it applies for my customers' environment. Whipped out my presentation 32-bit VHD that has all my demos on it - and found that Hyper-V insisted that the hardware of that VHD had changed so much that the virtual's OS had to be re-activated. Then the second shoe dropped. I couldn't get Hyper-V to see my laptop's NIC (Wi-Fi is totally out of the question with Hyper-V). The last two days have been spent trying to get my virtual activated - or more precisely, Hyper-V to allow my guest OS access to my network. No joy.
Pressure's mounting because we're on our way to the Richmond SPUG tonight, en route to Roanoke's SPUG Friday, Sept 25th - where I'm supposed to present for half a day - with the virtual I can't get to boot. Other issues on other laptops cropped up along the way (e.g. former demo laptop has dead video - it's a brick on KVM, former, former laptop doesn't have enough RAM so virtual is dog-slow..) You get the picture. Tick, tick, tick.. Finally dropped back and punted - meaning I loaded Windows 7 on my Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V laptop in dual-boot mode, and now I can at least run the 32-bit VMs from Windows 7, albeit only allowed about 3.5 GBs of my 8 GBs of RAM. Still, it's operational.
So now while my husband drives us to Richmond (traffic sucks, of course - tunnels, Navy traffic,...), I'm installing core applications on the new Win 7 image - Office 2007, Tweetdeck, my Verizon aircard app,
I dropped by my blog to grab former presentations I'm giving tomorrow in Roanoke - so I can polish them up - and decided to vent my virtual frustrations here.
Final piece of getting my 32-bit VMs to work in my Hyper-V laptop will be to install Hyper-V Server on my desktop at home, get that Hyper-V to authenticate my 32-bit VMs, and then export/import them over to my laptop running Hyper-V. Wish me luck!