Dave's MCT Stuff

Hypervisors in Hypervisors in Hypervisors…. To infinity and Beyond? by Dave

During this past Thursday night’s Montgomery Windows IT Pro user group meeting, I gave a demonstration of the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview operating system. I showed how Windows 8 Consumer Preview (CP) has a hypervisor and can run Hyper-V as a feature.

The Windows 8 CP I’m using is actually a virtual machine I built in Windows Server 2008 R2. So, on my laptop I’ve installed Windows Server 2008 R2 and I’ve created 3 virtual machines: Windows 7, Windows 8 CP and Windows Server 8 Beta. I added all three as native boot VHDs so I can boot to them and directly access the laptop’s hardware, etc., without going through the Windows Server’s hypervisor. It’s not hard to do (see previous blog entry) at all as long as you have the disk space to accommodate each OS. In fact, I almost always boot to the Windows 7 vhd as my primary when actually using the laptop apart from demonstrations.

So, at the meeting I had booted to the Windows 8 CP vhd to demonstrate all the functionality of the new OS (minus touch, as I do not have a touch screen on the laptop). I showed the group how to install the Hyper-V feature and explained the requirements (CPU with AMD-V or Intel VT-64 plus Second Level Address Translation or SLAT, enough memory to run the VMs and the host). ----

ASIDE--- How to, without the Control Panel? My way: Go to Search (get to search by putting mouse cursor in far right bottom, search icon “floats” up on screen above), change Search parameter from Apps to Settings, type in “add Windows features”. This causes a “Windows Features” icon to “float” up on the screen which you can click on and then it will cause the traditional “Turn Windows Features On or Off” menu to appear. Scroll down to Hyper-V. You can install Hyper-V Manager and Hyper-V Management Tools at this point by expanding the list item and checking both boxes, then clicking on Apply. Your Windows 8 CP machine will then reboot a couple of times and then viola, you’ll have Hyper-V to add vm’s, import and export them, and there are a bunch of new features available like creating a virtual Fiber Channel SAN and virtual switches… Enough to geek me out and the group!

So the next step was adding a vm. Since the host WAS a Hyper-V server I had plenty of vhd’s lying around on the hard drive. I simply created a new vm in Windows 8 CP Hyper-V by using an already existing Windows Server 2008 R2’s vhd… This worked fine and I was able to bring up the vm and use it from within Windows 8 CP. So somebody asked if it would work within running the Windows 8 CP OS I had as a vm itself, and then bring up Hyper-V on that vm and try to run the Windows Server vm I had just created as a vm…. Hmmmm, now why not? That would be, as Butthead says, Cool!

This I did. Booted back to the original Win Server 2008 R2, launched the Windows 8 CP virtual machine, logged in, started Hyper-V on it and started the new Win Server vm I just made! It worked! It booted up!!!!

Still, a couple of problems. Each time I went into the Windows 8 CP vm it captured my mouse and my video experience was scroll bound. I tried to install the Integration Services but got a “This version of Windows does not Support Integration Services” message. I’m assuming that’s a Windows 8 CP issue. Also, not all the virtualization services on the Windows 8 CP vm would auto start; I had to start them manually. Still, I’m not done. My next step is to try to native boot into the new Win Server vm and add the Hyper-V role and then add a new vm to it. Then I’ll boot back to the original Windows Server and bring up the vm’s in vm’s in vm’s!

Wish me luck!!! If I keep going, how far do you think I’ll get?

Perhaps it will be like in the end of Poltergeist, when the house collapses on itself and is swallowed into a black hole?