SBS 2011 on a virtual machine – creating a Hyper-v VM

There is no need to beat around the bush.  It works, and it works well.  At least for hyper-v hosting systems like Microsoft Windows 2008 R2, where I have done most of my testing.  I have little reason to doubt that it works fine on other hosting platforms as well.

If you haven’t tried using virtual machines yet, read the following few paragraphs to get a quick how to guide for Windows 20008 R2.  It’s pretty much the same thing for Windows 2008.

The very first thing you should do is determine if you have an adequate hardware platform for hosting.  Simply put, the beefier your processor(s) and the more memory you have, the better your virtual machines will run.  Yet with a modest server (a Dell T310 with 16GM of memory) I have a Windows 2008 R2 Standard host operating system, a virtual 2008 R2, a virtual 2003 R2 server, a virtual Windows 7 Ultimate, and a virtual Windows XP machine all running nicely.  The latter two machines are allocated only 1GB each and still run nicely and the servers have 4GB and 2GB each and also do nicely. Of course, these are not machines that are heavily used, but still, it’s hard not to be impress with their performance knowing they are so limited in resources.

If you running 2008 or 2008 R2, the first thing you need to do is to enable the Hyper-v role.  From Server Manager, use Add Roles to accomplish this.  It will require a re-boot to complete the addition of the new role, and it takes a few minutes for that role to configure during the restart.  You might also need to check your BIOS settings; you need to enable virtualization there.  Some machines come with it enabled but many do not.

Once the role is added, start Hyper-v Manager located on Administrative Tools. 

Although this view shows a virtual machine running, creating a new one is done the same way.  However, there is one task you should do first and another optional one.  The first task is to set the virtual network up for use by the machines.  The second and optional one is to change the Hyper-v default settings for where virtual machines will be stored.  As you can change it when a machine is created, it is completely optional.

To set up the network for virtual machines, click on Virtual Network Manager on the right hand action pane.  I won’t go through all the options but rather focus on the following scenario:

• Your host machine has a single NIC card
• Your NIC has a local LAN address and Internet Access
• You want the virtual machines to have the same thing.

It’s pretty simple then.  When the Virtual Network Manager opens, in the right hand pane you are offered to create a new virtual network adapter.  Chose External and click Add.  On the next screen, give it a name. Something like Virtual Network Adapter is just fine.  Below that is a radio button set; choose External and from the drop down list, pick the host machine’s NIC.  Click OK.  That’s pretty much it, and you are ready to create your first virtual machine.

Back in Hyper-v Manager, click on New on the action pane and choose virtual machine.  Click past the wizard start screen and specify the name of the virtual machine.  Meaningful is good.  You can accept the default storage location or choose a new one.  Click Next.  Allocate memory to the machine and click next. Then choose the network adapter you set up earlier and click next.

Now you will create the virtual hard disk aka .vhd.  About the only thing you need to change is the size if you want it bigger than 127GB.  The other settings are just fine.  Click next.

If you leave the default “Install an operating system later” then all that happens is that the .vhd is created and the machine will be ready to run at some future point.  For almost all of my purposes, I use an .iso image of whatever OS I want to install. If you have that, click on Install an operating system from a boot CD/DVD-ROM, click on Image FIle and browse to the location.  If you have a physical CD/DVD-ROM, insert the disk and choose the drive letter.

Finish the setup, and if you selected to install an OS, sit back and watch the machine come to life and install the os.  From then on, it is as real as any other machine in your world.

My SBS 2011 was a migration install, running as a virtual machine as a destination server with a physical machine hosting the source SBS 2008 server.  The only difference in how all this works from two physical servers is using the migration answer file.

You cannot directly use a USB device on a virtual machine, so no answer file on a flash drive stick.  Instead, create an .iso from the saved answer file and mount it in the virtual machine’s CD/DVD drive.  To do that, click on the media menu at the top of the virtual machine’s window and choose DVD then mount to mount the .iso file.  Or put in on real media and insert into the host drive.  SBS 2011 installation will find it.

I would love to say that everything was splendid with the migration and virtualization, but it wasn’t.  It took almost two weeks of intense work and investigation and the help of some very talented and good friends to find and fix the issue. None of which had anything to do with the machine being virtual, but finding that out took a lot of hard work.

I will post those findings and trials and tribulations with proper credits and thanks in the upcoming week.