My Microsoft Ignite 2019 Activity Summary

Microsoft Ignite 2019

You always get overwhelmed and impressive by Microsoft Ignite, no matter how many times you have been on it. The energy from the attendees and organizers are always a boost that makes the jetlag and sore feet from all the walking feel quite unimportant.

Installing Android on a Hyper-V virtual machine

Working with mobile device management (MDM) require a lot of testing. With Windows 10 testing is no problem (except those things that demand to be done on a physical device by different reasons), they can easily be run virtual. But when it comes to phones and tablets it have not been that easy. Visual Studio and some other solutions where out there, but they did not come with Store access or they had dependence which excluded Hyper-V from running. Some Emulators runs in a Hyper-V VM with Windows 10, but not on the host itself. So, if you got it to work it was usually slow and painful.

Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate Ready For Download

You can download either an ISO file or an VHD file. Cool that you can download a ready made VHD and just import it into Hyper-V and test it.

The Windows 8 Release Preview are also ready

First Server are now up and running

Sleeping with Hyper-V

NO, I do not have a sick fetish (at last not one including Hyper-V). But I do alot of demoing on my laptop and love to use Hyper-V for that.

This means that I cannot use an ordinary Windows 7 client installation, we have to wait for Windows 8 for Hyper-V to be supported in the client operatin system.

I have been using Windows Server as my laptop OS for quite some time now and the only thing I missed was the possibility to use the "Sleep" feature (not that big deal when using SSD disk when starting, but the shutdown are slow because of the saving of running VM's)

 

So I found a solution sometime ago.

Running Bitlocker in Vmware on a Virtual Computer

Needed to be sure that my previous posting also worked in Vmware, so I asked my excellent new colleague Christian Mohn the vNinja and he tested it out.

Everything works just like in my posting, but of course it's not that easy in Vmware ;-)
You just need to create a virtual floppy and the vNinja did of course create a blog post explaining how to do it. The blog are here

Running Bitlocker on a Virtual computer

Just for testing it could be nice to run Bitlocker on a virtual Windows. But as everybody knows (or should know), you need TPM or a USB stick to be able to run Bitlocker encryption on the disk.

Or do we?

Linux running on Hyper-V

A great news for people wanting to run Hyper-V but have problems setting up the Linux integration components on there linux VM's. Micosoft have been working hard after the code intended to ble implimentet into the kernel back in 2009 was rejected and have now been accepted into the next kernel version.

The changes will be availabe in Linux kernel 3.0.0 and will be a major step in making Hyper-V the best choice for virtualization undependent on what you want to virtualize.

More details can be found on David A. Wheeler's Blog here

Free ISCSI Target from Microsoft

Microsoft have made the Iscsi Software Target available for public download. So if you have a Windows Server 2008 R2 you can use it as a NAS device. Not recommended for big solutions, but perfect for test/demo and small companies/ branch offices.

 

It's real perfect for testing out clustering featues, like Hyper-v, Exchange and so on.

The Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 provides storage (disks) over a TCP/IP network. It turns a computer running Windows Server into a storage device which provides shared block storage. You can use Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 to perform a variety of storage-related tasks, including the following:

• Provide shared storage for Hyper-V to enable high availability and live migration
• Consolidate storage for multiple application servers (i.e. Microsoft SQL Server or Hyper-V)
• Provide shared storage for applications hosted on a Windows failover cluster
• Enable diskless computers to boot remotely from a single operating system image using iSCSI

More info here

And download are here

If download link are missing just go to Microsoft download center and search for Microsoft ISCSI Software Target (and you will also find the never version when it arrives ;-)

Hyper-V in Windows Server "8" news

Something are now starting to getting leaked about the next server version and Hyper-V :-)

Not sure about the limit but you can now assign more then 16 virtual cpu to each virtual guest (my guess are 32 is the limit, but they might still surprise us)

And the coolest feature (at least for now) are Hyper-V Replica some info here
Its free and a buildin feature of the next Hyper-V who can replicate your virtual machine over the network to different devices, or just a ordinary windows server. It can contain different timed versions (snapshots) and will be a much better function than having the snapshot eating your diskspace on the Hyper-V disk system (and the problem with merging snapshots file who now only accour after a shutdown of the computer).Yet another free feature that other will charge a leg and a arm for :-)

About 37 minutes into this you can check it out http://bit.ly/qRXLqF