| Sys Admin Extraordinaire |

2011-01-03 Update

2010-12-19 Initial Post

From previous research I know that Hyper-V (as of 2008 R2) still does not support Wi-Fi/wireless networking for use by virtual machine guests (at least not directly-- see my update from 2010-12-27 below); the host itself will support wireless though. With VMware ESXi 4.1 I couldn't find anything that states that even the host will support wireless. ESXi guests might be able to use wireless via VMDirectPath or USB device passthrough, but I haven't fully researched that.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I found a way to get around an issue with how to give my Hyper-V and ESXi hosts access to my home wireless network. (more…)

2010-11-15 Initial Post

I tried to install VMware ESXi 4.1 (VMware vSphere Hypervisor) inside a VM on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and the install won't complete. I wasn't sure if it would work, but I thought I'd give it a shot. Why did I want to do this?

1.) I have a Dell desktop that ESXi will not install on directly. Apparently it has something to do with the SATA drives.
2.) I don't want to pay for VMWare Workstation, which is supposed to be able to host ESXi servers as guests.

The ESXi install gets stuck at this line: Booting: MBI=0x000100a8, entry=0x0040024a.

From what I've read, ESXi cannot install on IDE drives. Hyper-V does have SCSI virtual hard disk drives, but it doesn't allow a SCSI drive to be the boot/system drive. This is the notification in the Hyper-V Manager : Do not attach a system disk to a SCSI controller. A virtual hard disk that contains an operating system must be attached to an IDE controller.

Regardless of that message, I still tried to install ESXi on a SCSI VHD and it got stuck at the same line.

2011-01-13 Updated

2010-10-17 Initial Post

Windows Server 2008 R2, Enterprise

I decided to give this another shot today and try to figure out how to create multiple subnets/virtual networks so that I can set up a more realistic AD infrastructure with multiple sites/subnets. (more…)

2010-02-08 Initial Post

If you're using Hyper-V, you don't need to do this because Hyper-V has settings in the GUI for VM startup and shutdown. This post is only for Virtual PC 2004 / 2007 (I haven't used Virtual Server 2005 so I can't comment on that). I still use Virtual PC 2007 because I have to keep my home host computer on Windows XP, otherwise I would switch to Hyper-V. (more…)

2011-02-15 Updated

2008-10-15 Initial Post

Per this MS page on 2010-02-07, to run Hyper-V “a 64-bit system with hardware-assisted virtualization enabled and data execution prevention (DEP) is required.” (more…)