Tariq Jaber.. » Hyper-v

Considerations when hosting Active Directory domain controller in virtual hosting environments

Tariq Jaber — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:31:19 +0000

A worth reading KB about hosting a domain controller in a virtual environment.
Considerations when hosting Active Directory domain controller in virtual hosting environments

Exchange 2010 on a Hyper-V guest machine

Tariq Jaber — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:44:00 +0000

If you want to deploy Exchange Server 2010 on a Hyper-V guest machine then make sure your environment meets the following conditions:

Requirements for Exchange guest machine:

It is deployed on Windows Server 2008/SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 OS.
Doesn’t have the Unified Messaging server role installed. UM server role is not supported as a virtual box because of the real-time response required by voice communications.
Using fixed virtual hard disks (VHDs) and it should be less than 2,040 GB. Virtual disks that dynamically expand or differential virtual disks aren’t supported by Exchange.
The host machine must be dedicated only to run guest machines. It is not supported to have AD, Exchange, SQL or SAP on the host server.
Database Availability Groups (DAG) are supported in a virtualization environment if the host machine is not clustered, Microsoft doesn’t support combining Exchange high availability solutions (DAGs) with hypervisor-based clustering.
Taking virtual machine snapshots of an Exchange guest virtual machine isn’t supported. This is because snapshots aren’t application aware, and using them can have unintended and unexpected consequences for a server application that maintains state data, such as Exchange.
The VHD that will host the guest OS has a minimum requirement of 15 GB plus the size of the virtual memory that’s allocated to the Exchange guest machine. For example if you allocated 32 GB to Exchange then the minimum supported VHD size for the OS is 47 GB (15+32), fixed size VHD.
Storage used by Exchange should be hosted in disk spindles that are separate from the storage that’s hosting the guest virtual machine’s operating system.

for more information about this, see Exchange 2010 System Requirements.

Licensing Windows Server in a Virtual Environment

Tariq Jaber — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:06:20 +0000

The following link provides a good description of “Licensing Windows Server in a Virtual Environment”:

http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspirit/archive/2008/11/13/licensing-windows-server-in-a-virtual-environment.aspx

Hyper-V Mouse not captured in Remote Desktop session.

Tariq Jaber — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 09:06:30 +0000

If you are connecting using remote desktop to the server on which you installed Hyper-v role. When you try to connect to a guest machine for the first time and you want to install the operating system, you are using the mouse, you will receive the message:

“Mouse not captured in Remote Desktop session”

The solution for this is to connect physically to the server and install the OS on the guest machine!