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Dear All, I am very much a learning network manager (although aren't we all?) and for ages I've been looking for something to help me set up an isolated Hyper-V lab. Something I can test new applications with and something I can break, that won't interfere with my main network yet has the convenience of being installed so it can access the internet. Well I've finally found a great tutorial that I've just finished with a lot of success. The website has some formatting problems, and if you want to view the images you have to open them up in a new tab and change the URL so it doesn't try to access through https but these issues are outweighed by how helpful the four step tutorial was. Here's the link - enjoy!

We currently have 20 servers and I've been learning about HYPERV recently. I was wondering what servers would be good candidates for virtualisation. I'm guessing things like Exchange \ MSSQL \ SIMS \ DCs shouldn't be virtualised as they use too many resources. I assume things like DNS \ DHCP \ Print Services \ RO-DCs would be good suggestions (obviously having a non Virtualised server with DNS \ DHCP on as well for redundency). So do these look ok? What else would you virtualise and what servers would you avoid being virtualised? I suppose the best way is to see what other people have done and here from their experiences regarding what works and what doesn't. Thanks guys.

Hello guys. I have a server running windows 2012 R2 backup services. The server has a Hyper-V with 3 VMs on it.(C drive) The E Drive has 2 VM's. I want to do a bare metal backup with a externa HD with 3.7TB size available. My drives size are: C: 1.8TB available 150GB E: 650GB available 270GB My external drive has 3.7TB Went I want to run the backup, I got a error saying that shadow copy is unable to continue because doesn't have enough space available. Them my doubt are: 1) the shadow copy process on each drive, use the same drive for the task? if Yes, is possible to use a temporal drive and help this process to finish? My drive has little space available right? 2)In this task, the process chose all the drives available, if I want to backup my VM's, I have to chose them from the Hyper-V list the gui show me or I went the process select the whole drive, is taking backups from my VM's? i upload a picture related to this last question. Thanks for your help and time!!!

Hi there, Looking for some help in moving a set of virtual servers from one Hyper-V cluster to another. We have one cluster comprised of 5 servers connected to its own SAN (lets call it cluster 1), but we have just setup a new cluster running Server 2012 and connected it to its own NAS (cluster 2). We are still in the early stages so we do not want to migrate all the VMs in the entire cluster, rather one VM at a time. At the moment we have to export a VM in cluster 1 to a local storage location, copy it across the network to a node in cluster 2 and re-import it. Very time consuming. Is there a better way to get a server from one cluster to another? Thanks

Hi, Our SIMS server is visualised (p2v) running on 2008 R2 HyperV Host Server. The host server has 32Gb RAM and dual processors with 16 cores available. The SIMS Server runs at 100% CPU most of the time which makes SIMS.net really sloooow. I've checked in the task manager and it is the SQL process (sqlservr.exe) that is the cause. Yet when I look at the host task manager it never goes over 2-3% cpu on any core. So the host processing power is not being passed to the guest. The guest already has the max 4 logical processors and being 2003 x86 std I can't give it more than 4Gb RAM. I've got to move SIMS over to a new 2008 x64 R2 server in the summer (which I hope would have better performance, being optimised for virtualization). Is there anything I can do to speed up this 2003 virtual machine in the meantime? Thanks,

Hi All, What spec of server would be suitable for 60 clients to connect to VDI In-A-Box? We want to run Windows 7 for all users so 1.5GB minimum RAM for each connection?, want around a 20GB base image, we use HyperV for virtualisation. Any more info you need just ask, thanks!

OK, I've got to create a new virtual appliance for ESET as centos is no longer supported. The upgrade involves making a new virtual machine, this is provided in the form of a vhdx file from ESET. The ESET instructions assume a working knowledge of HyperV The gist is to create a gen1 virtual machine and point to the downloaded VHDX provided. I'll assume if I did this it'd be running from my downloads folder not the SAN. Do I have to create the new VM from the cluster manager (not hyperv manager) but I don't know how to access the SAN storage correctly.. I do see "cluster storage" folder in the c drive of the hyper v hosts, this seems to have all the virtual server drives in it. (I assume this is a shortcut or pointing folder) can I just pop the VHDX in here? cheers! I've moved from Vmware to HyperV thanks to Broadcom:(

As you will see from my previous thread we have a new Hyper-V cluster set up. We are looking into the different ways of moving a VM from one cluster to another. Both Exporting the VM and simply copying and pasting the relevant folder to the NAS works, but exporting takes forever. My question is, does anyone know the benefits of Exporting versus copying and pasting? We have a lot of VMs to move and its a time consuming process to Export.

Evening, I just thought i'd post this on here, as i don't think it has been posted before or/ if it has it might of been a while ago but just wanted to point some people to this. Core Configurator 2.0 (Windows Server 2008 R2) and Core Configuration for Windows 2008 -Core Configurator Download Now! both software packages doing pretty much the same thing, it basically just provides you with a simple GUI rather then submitting the commands via command prompt. I personally prefer to use the Command Line Interface, but i guess some people may find it much easier to use the above / or prefer to use a GUI rather than CLI. Just thought i'd mention it James.

I was just wondering how other people backup their HyperV Guests. As far as I can tell there are several options: Backup the Guest OSes from within each Guest OS (e.g. using msbackup/ntbackup) Backup the host (which also backups up the Guest OSes e.g. Win 2003..Win2008). Stop the Guest machines and copy the .VHD files to an external USB backup drive. Use third party backup software (e.g. Veritas) on Host or Guests. Microsoft's backup/DR system (can't recall its name). 1) Seems problematic: How to setup consequtive backups to one USB backup drive? Possible? msbackup (in Win2k8) seems very limited. 2) Seems simpliest, but big problem is that the MS docs I've read says that you can only restore the entire Guest, not individual files. 3) Would seem like the best/simplest option. Simply schedule the Guests to stop, then copy the .VHD files to an external backup USB drive. For Disaster Recovery this is excellent as it would be so simple to create a new Guest using the .VHD file. And someone has informed me that you can use utilities to drill into the file to restore individual files. 4) At £300 per remote license, I want to avoid this for now (!). With around 10 Guest OSes we would need to spend £3,000+VAT. Plus a new license for the main software (currently on V9). 5) I'm very interested in this option, as all our servers are Windows based, and hope that MS would do a hefty Educational Discount. But this would have to come out of next year's budget or Captial Bid for implemation in the Summer. Any advice appreciated, Thanks, Bruce.

Hello all - Hope your summer projects are going well! Next week I am planning to migrate our two on prem hosts from ESXi v8.0.3 to Server 2022 Datacentre with HyperV roles. Broadcom can stuff it. I am planning on using Veeam to move the virtual machines across. This is the first time I've done such a migration. My plan is as follows Remove VMware Tools from all VM's, power off VM's Take fresh incremental backup of all powered off VM's Install Server2022 on both hosts, setup & configure HyperV role Use Veeam instant recovery to fire the VM's back up from the latest incremental backup Re-configure/check backup jobs If you have done such a task before, I would greatly appreciate any pointers/caveats.. TIA!

ATM we have two 2012 Dc Servers on a VMware platform. But migrating them onto too a HyperV platform. Any advice you can offer would be great.? At this time I am NOT looking to upgrade the OS’s on these DC’s When I initially installed a ‘test’ server system on hyper I was getting connectivity issues. But that was because I was using Gen 1 and not 2. Thanks

Link: Download Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0 from Official Microsoft Download Center

Hey, thank you in advance for any comments, tips etc. Facing a peculiar issue on two file servers, it was originally just one. However, the second one has started doing the same thing, whereby file access for reading/writing is very slow, and disk active time shows 100% in resource monitor. It feels like a hardware issue; however, the two file servers are at different schools, run on similar but different hardware, and both run Windows Server 2019 Std full patched. The hardware the two VMs run on is similar, HPE Servers; one has an HPE MSA 1050 with 10Gb iSCSI connections (2 each in multipath active active, so 20Gb in total), and the other has 12Gb SAS (2 each in multipath active active so 24Gb in total) with the same HPE MSA 1050. The MSA 1050s themselves each have 24 x 1.2Tb 10k SAS disks in a RAID10 volume. The HV hosts run 2019 Datacenter and are also fully patched. Ther other virtual machines on the failover cluster as well as other large file server arent affected at all. Things we have tried. Turning off Sophos Uninstalling Sophos Turning off Windows Defender and Real-time scanning Deduped the Data to be none dedupe (one server is still deduped) Re-Installed the OS Recreated the VHDX and restored from backup all the data Drivers on the Hyper-V hosts for storage controllers Setup hyper-v replication to a spare none SAN-based server and replicated the server to this, then swapped the servers round live so the primary one was running from the spare server; this seemed to solve the issue strangely, so is this a hardware issue? I moved it back to the failover cluster, and it appeared to be fine but then started with the active time again shortly after. Upgraded Veeam to the latest version as though it might be CBT causing the issue. However, I haven't yet turned off CBT as I can't find a guide on how to achieve this completely. Screenshot of the error with sensitive data covered over. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Hello, i am after a bit of advice as have been struggling with this issue ever since the summer: Previous to the summer all of our servers were running on Vmware ESXI 6.5 on a HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen 9. During the summer we migrated to Hyper V 2019 on Intel Server System R2308WFTZS. The migration went smooth except for that all of the migrated Vms have a write speed of around 20mb and a read speed of 800mb+.. This is causing issues with staff/student file shares etc. All the VMs were converted to a Gen 1 hyper V VM. The host speeds are 800mb+ read and write. The intels are connected by 10gb fibre and have NVME drives for storage. I have tried the following with no fix: 1) Convert the whole Gen 1 VM to Gen 2 VM - still slow write 2) Convert the HDD from Gen 1 to Gen 2 and make a new Gen 2 VM from scratch and attach the HDD - - still slow write 3) Install the latest guest VM drivers - still slow write 4) Restore the server from a backup - still slow write If i run a disk speed test on the VMs the read/write is normal so i am assuming somewhere down the line it is the link between the host an the VM which is causing the issue. If i make a brand new Gen 2 server from scratch the speeds are fine. The network driver on the VMs is 2006 which seems a bit odd.. Basically after any advice from anyone who has any experiance with HyperV as most of my knowledge was with VMware. Thankyou.

Hi, Am looking into (finally) virtualising the servers here, and just wanted to ask if anyone out there is using HyperV with CC4 running happily on it, and whether they have any comments on it ? RM are still using VMWare, but there is money to be saved... Thanks for any comments, Anne :-)