HyperV, RDP, Single Node Clusters & Build Speeds

Building out a Test Lab with HyperV has highlighted some small little items that I'd thought I’d pass along to save you time if your building test labs as well.

RDP – once you have RDP’ed onto the HyperV host, you can

• build a VM from the wizard
• connect to the VM console and power it up

However, until the Integration Services is installed on the VM, you won’t be able to interact within the VM - which means that if you're required to aid the VM build by mouse clicks input - you can't via a RDP session on the HyperV host, until the VM OS has reached a stage where the Integration Service can be installed.

So until the VM OS has reached a stage ready for Integration Services, either you could use a method of getting to console session zero to interact within the VM session. (MSTSC /Console doesn't work either!). Or use this slight condescending guide from MS

However if you build a VM on a Hyperv R2 RC server the RDP issue is resolved. So nice work MS Engineers.

Single HyperV hosted VM 2008 clusters – While I was building out my test Exch 2007 lab I needed to created a SCR passive node W2008 clustered target VM. Created the Exch SCR 2008 VM’s disks from the local disk on the host HyperV box. Installed Clustering failover on the VM, installed clustering successfully, yet the cluster disks I had created wouldn’t be seen by the cluster. As the local disks are local – you can’t use them to build a cluster as the VM disks are not seen by the cluster as, yes you guessed it, ISCSI disks.

Solutions to this one for me were, either V2V the VM to a ESX4i server then create the cluster disks using VMWare’s fault tolerant options, or build out a VM hosting FREENAS to create some ISCSI disks for the single node VM cluster. One I haven’t done, but there are loads of blogs about how to use it, is to download the Starwind ISCSI software. Personally Starwind doesn't give what I need, the free version has no clustering support, so for the enterprise functionality I want from HyperV I'll stick to FreeNas running as a VM for my Cluster disks.

Building ISO’s - if your building a lab on 1 host and have 1 ISO image to build from, and require multiple W2008’s VM’s to be built, it may actually quicker to build the VM’s 1 at a time rather than all at once. Why? Because once all your VM’s start to reference the same larger files on the same ISO at the same time, it really slows the build times down due to I/O access contention. Try it yourself!