1. Make sure that the virtual machine in question is turned off and is not in any hibernation state.
2. Once that is done you right click the Virtual machine. Remove any NIC’s that may currently be installed.
3. Click “Add hardware”. It should be the top most option.
4. You will select Legacy NIC
5. Apply the settings and start the virtual machine

Notice that the Legacy Network Adapter will be yellowie-orangish color and say “Legacy Network Adapter”.

After doing some searching around I found a great article about setting up a private virtual NIC on both the Hyper-V Host and Hyper-V client and setting the IPs to the same subnet.

While this might be OK for some people I really miss the ability to just copy files from the host machine like I could in Virtual PC/VMware.

After day dreaming for a bit how this could be done I thought I remember seeing an option in Windows 7 Disk manager to not only CREATE but Mount VHD files. I then started thinking what if I create a VHD and then mount it. Copy the files to the VHD and then mount the VHD in the virtual machine.

It could be like using a networked USB Drive.

Open Disk Management in Windows 7. Create VHD.

I saved this file to my desktop. It doesn’t seem to let you save to a network location.

You will need to initialize the disk

This will walk you through the volume and format wizard. I am assuming you have experience with this.

Copy the files you want on the virtual disk drive.

You will need to “detach” the VHD drive in Drive Manager.

Click “OK” when this window pops up.

Copy this VHD to the Hyper-V Host. I like to put it in a shared directory I use for media. ie. iso’s & vhd’s etc.

Open the properties of the virtual machine.

Add a Hard drive. Point the wizard to where ever you copied the newly created VHD.

Hit apply.

Boot up the Virtual Machine.

1.) Hyper-V Manager can be installed as a download for Windows Vista and Windows 7. I’ve written a How to manage Hyper-V server from Windows 7 article.

2.) System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is so much better then Hyper-V Manager. In my opinion this should not be an add-on. Unfortunately it isn’t. Here’s a link to the SCVMM website.

What is Sysprep?

Sysprep is a tool that Microsoft released way back to help with cloning physical machines. Because Virtual machine act very much like their Physical brethren, one would think that you could use it on virtual machines as well. You would be write! In fact I find that it’s usage in Virtual machines makes even more sense.

Pre-requisites

1. Make sure you have installed a Virtualization software. Virtual PC , VM Workstation etc.
2. Have all Server Media. You will need to copy some files off the server disks.

Windows 2003 Server

1.) Make sure that you install the Windows Server 2003

2.) Run all the updates you will want on the Base server. You can do this by visiting Windows Update and applying all the updates. This will most likely take a very long time.

3.) Open “My Computer” and create a folder called “Support”.

4.) Put in CD/DVD into computer or mount an ISO of the OS. (if it isn’t still there from the install)

5.) Go to the “\Support\Tools” folder on the disk. Open the support.cab file by double clicking on it.

6.) Highlight all the files and copy them to “C:\Support”.

7.) Right click “My Computer” and select properties.

8.) Click the “Advance Tab”.

9.) Click “Environment Variables” button

10.) Go to the end of the “Variable value” box and type “;c:\support”. The “;” makes sure the OS knows to make “support” a separate value.

11.) Hit “OK” , “OK’” etc till you have all the windows closed.

12.) Restart your machine to enable the path setting you just entered.

13.) Log into the server after reboot.

14.) open command prompt by clicking “STAT – RUN” then typing “CMD”.

15.) Type “sysprep” at the command prompt.

16.) A new window will open called “System Preparation Tool 2.0”. Click “Ok”.

17.) Click “Reseal”

Machine will turn off.

18.)This file can now be used on several machines. I’d make a folder where you store you’re VMS and create a folder called one called “Sysprep Image”.

19.) Turn on your machine. You will see something similar to a default install without waiting for files to be copied!

Once you click finish your machine is production ready. Best of all this machine is supported by Microsoft. If you use a program to just change the SID of the machine Microsoft will NOT support it.

I have seen this documented in a couple of places now – but I also see a number of people still wondering why this is happening and how to stop it, so I thought I would post it here too.  When you first add a Hyper-V host to SCVMM 2008 you may see a warning icon displayed with the message "Needs Attention" and "Virtualization service version status is not up-to-date".  To get rid of this alert there are three updates that need to be applied to the Hyper-V server:

• KB950050: This is the RTM update for Hyper-V
• KB956589:  This is an update to Hyper-V specifically for SCVMM compatibility
• KB956774: This is an update to the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) client in Windows Server 2008

Once you have these three updates installed everything should come up green.