Comments on Unproductivity Defined: Virtualizing Windows Home Server On Hyper-V

To those wondering about the "USB passthrough...

2011-05-17T17:29:17.362-04:00

To those wondering about the "USB passthrough": For USB drives, just put them offline (just like internal drives) with using the Disk Management MMC snap-in of your remote computer, and they'll be available to add to the VM. For USB printers, forget about it -- you can spin your wheels for days on this. (If you want to have a common shared printer on your machine because it's on all the time, go the full Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V Role, and share your printer from the host partition. But it's not free.)

This blog is a great Hyper-V/WHS case study that helped me implement virtualization, but I had to go to numerous sources to get the management of Hyper-V worked out smoothly -- lots of firewall rules to touch, above and beyond the script that's available if you want to see the Hyper-V host and share its drives on your network and control remotely with MMC, etc.

Also, be aware that you might need to disable the TCP Checksum Offload (IPv4) in the VM's Network Adapter to get reasonable throughput for large file copying and computer backups. Experiment with Net Meter.

If anybody figures out how a WHS 2011 VM can use WHS v1 VM DE shares for storage, please let me know -- might be the best of both worlds.

Mick Mickle

Any reason you went with hyper-v only and didn'...

2011-04-19T14:45:51.765-04:00

Any reason you went with hyper-v only and didn't do S2008R2 with hyper-v role. I am currently using the latter but am curious why you selected the method you did.

Joe, how do you enable USB passthrough? I'm us...

2011-02-26T10:21:07.306-05:00

Joe, how do you enable USB passthrough? I'm using a full WinServer install hosting Hyper-V, so maybe I need to switch to a setup like yours? Anything I can find on Google explicitly says that USB passthrough isn't supported by Hyper-V.

Joe, found your answer to my plans! I am looking...

2010-12-24T17:24:27.793-05:00

Joe,

found your answer to my plans! I am looking at a similar project, what whardware did you use in that case? MB, memory drives etc...

Thanks!

Great write-up! Thanks! I've never done anyt...

2010-12-14T16:56:23.485-05:00

Great write-up! Thanks!

I've never done anything like this but your instructions make me want to try.

Here is my situation, I've got a WHS and a Win7/Media Center PCs. Both run constantly because I record TV on my WMC7 machine using a 4 tuner Ceton PCI-e card.

Would it be possible to host both of these machines within Hyper-V? Would the WMC7 machine be able to make use of the card?

Thanks!

Alex, You've got it right. I'm getting o...

2010-12-01T00:17:12.496-05:00

Alex,

You've got it right. I'm getting over 100mb/s writes so the RAID-1 doesn't seem to be an issue. I usually have between 6-10 VM's going and performance is more than adequate. The VHD's actually don't change that much anyway once they're setup.

Hey Joe, awesome post - I'm a little late to t...

2010-11-30T23:36:59.065-05:00

Hey Joe, awesome post - I'm a little late to the party here but I'm in the middle of getting WHS running on Hyper-V as well. Quick question for you: so you are using RAID-1 for your "system" drive which contains the Hyper-V host OS as well as the guest VM's (.vhd's) right? Have you seen any performance impact as a result of doing this? I'm interested in using RAID-1 myself but am concerned that if I'm running 3 or 4 VM's that I might see some slow performance due to the mirroring. Thanks for any info!!

-alex

I've been trying all night to get my EXPI9301C...

2010-07-18T03:29:59.641-04:00

I've been trying all night to get my EXPI9301CT working with Hyper-V Server R2 to no avail.

I've tried with both the Microsoft and Intel drivers and they both show up in Device Manager with the yellow exclamation point saying "This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device."

This blog post is the only thing google searching got me even close to an answer. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I'm trying to do exactly the same thing here and want to give WHS a dedicated NIC.

on3eighteen, Haha, thanks. I'm no expert, ju...

2010-06-23T13:05:11.195-04:00

on3eighteen,

Haha, thanks. I'm no expert, just an enthusiast.

It may be that you don't have user accounts set up in Vail in order to see the shares. If that is the case, you could just enable the Guest account. And yeah, neither WHS v1 or Vail "support" RAID disks, although in most cases it will work fine as long as it's hardware RAID and transparent to the OS....or if it's virtualized as it is in my case on Hyper-V.

The point you made about the way shares are handled, I actually do like that change. If you were mapping drives and writing data directly to d:\shares in WHS v1, you may have not experienced any problems yet, but it's highly probably that you will. I had this same problem with WHS when it first came out, I was doing the same thing as you and writing data directly to d:\shares instead of using UNC paths. Drive Extender kept trying to write data to a drive that was actually already full. It didn't know the drive was full because it only saw data written to the shares if it came from the network. With the new version of Drive Extender, it works below the NTFS level. So, any data written to the disks, either natively or over the network, will be picked up by Drive Extender fine. As an interim solution for WHS v1, instead of mapping a drive, I just made a shortcut on the desktop to \\server\ and that's been servicing me fine for years now.

Joe -- your knowledge amazes me. Just when I thou...

2010-06-23T12:33:05.291-04:00

Joe -- your knowledge amazes me. Just when I thought I knew a thing or two...

I just installed Vail in an VM & I cannot access any of the shares from any of my computers on the network...even the WHS machine itself! I just found this article & it looks like WHS Vail cannot be installed on RAID disks. Well, that sucks. I am becoming less of a raving fan of Vail. The biggest thing I liked was the automated computer backup but that's not too hard to schedule w/ Windows 7 machines now. I don't care about the remote access stuff.

One last thing I don't like about Vail is that now the shares are partitions on the machine. Before, w/ WHS v1, I mapped a network drive to the "shares" folder so that any other computer could map a drive to that share & "see" all the shared folders. Now, w/ Vail, I cannot map a drive that contains all the shares. Granted, I did read that writing directly to the disk & not using the file share was not good. I'm not sure if that screwed up disk balancing & duplication but I did it. I never had to recover from a backup so maybe I was breaking things behind the scenes & didn't know it.

My main goal is to have 1 place w/ all my files (videos, movies, music, docs), have it on a drive(s) which are very fast, & have that stuff backed up. I don't think Vail will help me.

on3eighteen, I've played around with Vail mys...

2010-06-23T10:10:15.371-04:00

on3eighteen,

I've played around with Vail myself. Overall, I really like it, and I love the fact that you can remove the system disk from the pool as well. Though, I too am concerned about the disks being block based now. You are correct in that, currently, the disks can't be read by any other system. That's not to say that they couldn't write some software to allow you to do that, but it doesn't exist right now and it's not on their roadmap. The fact that you CAN do this with the current version is a primary reason I chose WHS. It's a warm and fuzzy blanket to me knowing that I can yank the drive out and plug it into anything and move the files if the need arose.

Since this seems to be something that's going away with Vail, I've actually been researching alternative file systems such as ZFS and BTRFS. I really like the management pieces to Vail, but since one of the primary reasons I use WHS will be gone, it's no longer worth it to me to lose half my storage to duplication. Luckily, though, Vail supports iSCSI targets for storage disks. Right now, I'm playing around with putting Solaris in a VM and having it host my disks using ZFS RAIDZ (RAID5 basically). Then I'm using that to offer iSCSI targets to Vail for storage. This gives me RAID5 like storage where not as much space is wasted, but also the easy management that WHS offers. The only problem I've run into so far is that there are no Hyper-V enlightened SCSI drivers for Solaris (or even BSD that I can find). This limits you to the 4 IDE channels in a Hyper-V VM. BTRFS is very similar linux equivalent to ZFS, but it's still in heavy development and currently doesn't support RAID5 (though it shouldn't be long).

I said all that to say, yeah, the block based system worries me too. If they were to offer an application that could be used to mount a Vail based disk and recover the files, though, that would probably alleviate my concerns altogether.

Your last question, you could do RAID0 if you wanted and backup the OS to somewhere else. And even easier would be to copy the VHD's to a USB drive or something. But honestly, those are both manual processes, or they'd need to be scripted somehow. RAID1 is more than fast enough for me and the most hands-off solution, so that's why I went that route.

Joe -- I am experimenting w/ WHS "Vail"....

2010-06-23T09:43:27.626-04:00

Joe -- I am experimenting w/ WHS "Vail". A cool feature is that you can remove the system disk from the storage pool so you don't have to worry about losing data if some is stored on that disk. You can also gain some performance b/c the system disk is just dedicated to running the OS.

One downside of Vail is that you can no longer access the storage drives (shares) from a computer not running the WHS software. This worries me a bit b/c I cannot just take that disk out & plug it into another computer & see all the files. Any idea if this is true and if that worries you too?

Lastly, I know you put your Server 2008 on a RAID1 drive so you have a backup. Would it also make sense to use RAID0 for speed & just manually backup the OS from within WHS itself? And you could also copy the VHDs to a USB drive if you wanted. Thoughts?

on3eighteen, I made it fixed, though it shouldn&#...

2010-06-22T11:01:16.108-04:00

on3eighteen,

I made it fixed, though it shouldn't really matter.

Joe -- did you create a 70GB dynamically expanding...

2010-06-22T07:11:19.486-04:00

Joe -- did you create a 70GB dynamically expanding VHD or a fixed size?

I just read that the new version of WHS (codenamed...

2010-06-21T10:54:52.923-04:00

I just read that the new version of WHS (codenamed "Vail") allows you to remove the system drive from the storage pool in order to speed up the OS. That should put some folk's fears about WHS being slow in a virtual hard disk b/c the writing/reading happens on separate, physical disks.

On3eighteen, I haven't experienced this probl...

2010-06-20T22:45:35.875-04:00

On3eighteen,

I haven't experienced this problem myself, so I can offer little input. Right away it seems like permission issues from running the server in a Workgroup instead of a Domain. HVRemote set up all of my permissions perfectly, but I did a little searching and found a possible work around for you. It involves disabling the firewall, but if it's a weird driver error it may be your only option. First, though, I would try rerunning HVRemote on both the server and the client.

http://blog.malevy.net/2009/11/home-server-part-2-installing-hyper-v.html

Joe -- I seem to be getting a very common error af...

2010-06-20T14:49:47.775-04:00

Joe -- I seem to be getting a very common error after Google'ing my error.

"Cannot connect to the RPC service on computer '192.168.0.150'. Make sure your RPC service is running."

I have read some threads about this issue creeping up if your Hyper-V server has a Broadcom NIC & I have read problems about security.

I know I have not given you much to go by but have you seen this error before?

on3eighteen, The hardware RAID is fine. My mothe...

2010-06-17T23:14:59.170-04:00

on3eighteen,

The hardware RAID is fine. My motherboard didn't have it so it wasn't an option. It doesn't really matter either way as almost all motherboard based RAID solutions are actually a hybrid hardware/software solution. It still uses the CPU to do all the work. There's not much benefit other than it being easier to set up that way.

For the 2nd question, yep the WHS configuration will be the same. There's some slight overhead for the full version of Server 2008, but it's really small unless you're actively using the other services on it. When you enable the Hyper-V role, a lot of the low level stuff in the 'host' OS becomes virtualized. It's not much different than just having an extra VM running on the box.

Joe -- well done indeed. A quick question about y...

2010-06-17T16:52:22.738-04:00

Joe -- well done indeed. A quick question about your software RAID1 setup. My mobo supports hardware-level RAID. I actually have 2 of my 1TB SATA drives configured in RAID1. May I just keep this configuration or do I need to "un-RAID" them in the RAID setup utility & go the software RAID route that you took?

Lastly, I am also thinking of installing the full blown Server 2008 R2 & installing Hyper-V as a role. Is it safe to assume that most, if not all, of the configuration setup for WHS will be the same? I imagine I'll take a hit on performance a bit across the board b/c I'm running a full blown OS vs. just a light-weight hypervisor.

Fixed it! Thanks. I went in ran the Intel Uninsta...

2010-05-27T16:44:55.807-04:00

Fixed it! Thanks.

I went in ran the Intel Uninstaller for the driver I'd added and it started working. Yipee. It's now running with Driver ver: 11.0.5.22. I guess the newer driver needed to be avoided as it didn't work.

Martin, I think I have the same NIC. I picked up...

2010-05-27T14:44:46.569-04:00

Martin,

I think I have the same NIC. I picked up the $30 EXPI9301CT. I really don't recall having to install drivers for it manually, I only had to do that for my storage card. I'll check later on tonight on what driver version I'm using.

I managed to setup remote device manager and the N...

2010-05-27T12:27:58.357-04:00

I managed to setup remote device manager and the NIC is showing there but with an exclamation mark indicating it's not working properly. Can you recall which driver you used and it's version, just in case the latest driver (15.2 IIRC) is causing the problem.

I'll take another look when I get home tonight.

Martin, I had no problems with mine. I just inst...

2010-05-26T23:47:29.052-04:00

Martin,

I had no problems with mine. I just installed the driver and it was working fine. Does the interface show up under ipconfig? If it's a matter of just being disabled, I think you can enable it via the command line with netsh.

netsh interface set interface *interfacename* enabled

Otherwise, DevCon is a cmd line utitily I've used for troubleshooting devices. Take a look at DevCon here.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff544707.aspx

Edit: Had to delete my previous comment because I typed the netsh command wrong.

2010-05-26T23:45:21.819-04:00

This comment has been removed by the author.

Hi There. Great couple of posts. I wanted to take ...

2010-05-26T16:50:19.634-04:00

Hi There. Great couple of posts. I wanted to take a look at Vail, so thought it time to move to a X64 capable platform for my always on PC in the loft currently running WHS.

So I bought a Asus P6T, i7 920, 12GB RAM, etc. Installed Hyper-V 2008 R2. Installed WHS and another Win7 VM just fine. I then added a PCIE Intel Pro 1000 CT NIC to the system with a plan to dedicate this to WHS as you had. This is when I hit problems.

From sConfig and HyperV manager is only shows the onboard RealTek NIC. I downloaded the Intel Windows 2008 x64 drivers (ProWinX64) the latest from the Intel site. I ran the setup program which installed the drivers, (since the problems I've also gone into the various directories and used the pnputil command to install drivers). Whatever I try no joy still doesn't appear. If I use the Intel prosetcl.exe command I can see the NIC, but it's shown as disabled and I can't see how to enable it.

Any ideas, since you have a very similar config?