First taste of 64 bit and Hyper-V
For TechED, I delivered some sessions on Rosario. This included a keynote demo and some breakout sessions. That is not the point of this post though. My main demo machine is a Dell D820 with 4GB RAM (although only 3.5GB is recognized :-(). This is a 64 bit machine but I have only installed the 32 bit versions running Windows Server as I wanted things like Team System to run. Rosario though, does not come in an installable format today - so I had no option but to use the virtual pc.
I was lucky to get a loan hard drive and decided to pursue Hyper-V as I told that would be give much better performance. HyperV runs only on 64 bit so I needed to install Windows Server 64 bit.
This was my first install of a 64 bit OS and overall I was happy. All my devices were recognized. Downloading the video drivers for Vista from the Dell site worked great too. I did not install much else on the machine (not even the .NET Framework) as this machine's goal was purely to act as a host for my virtual machines.
Getting started with HyperV was easy. I found the UI very intuitive - certainly a slot easier for me to use than Virtual Server.
After that, HyperV got a little confusing. I am not a regular VPC guy, but I got use to things like "Discard changes". HyperV does not have this concept. It uses snapshots where you can accomplish similar goals. The networking is also a little different, and I had some challenges there. Also if you had old VPC, when you run it on HyperV you need to activate the OS again - it sees it as a HAL change.
Some resources I found very useful.
How To: Get the TFS "Rosario" April 08 CTP running under Hyper-V is a truly excellent post. I used this as my main basis when starting and it made things easy. You will find the steps useful even if you are not running Rosario.
Getting UNDO functionality with Hyper-V Snapshots was very useful for me to understand how to get a clean state (Very important for demo)
I reckon this might well be the developer environment of the future. At Microsoft, there is guy Keith Combs running a Lenovo laptop with 8GB RAM. You can checkout how he was able to get 14 instances of Vista running.
I think all ISVs should make their software available - at least for trial purposes - through a virtual machine. We even have a program you can review at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/partners/vhdpartners.mspx. From that page
The Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program provides Microsoft’s partners a convenient and simplified process for creation of application images, facilitates its widespread distribution by making it available as a free download and enables accelerated evaluation and testing of these applications by customers. If you are Microsoft partner and would like to be able to distribute your applications in a VHD, you will have to sign the VHD redistribution agreement. To participate in this program, send an email to vhdinfo@microsoft.com and ask for a copy of the agreement to be signed and returned to Microsoft.