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Ben Armstrong: Last week I received the latest support call statistics for Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 – and it seems that a number of you are hitting problems that we know about – and have hotfixes “ready to go” for.  So I would like to take a moment to bring these hotfixes to your attention.

For any physical server running Windows 2008, you might as well enable Hyper-V. This way, you can get more use out of that one server by running multiple servers on it, and utilize unused CPU and RAM. So once you enable Hyper-V, how are you going to manage it from your desktop PC? You do not want to have to use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to connect to the server and launch the Hyper-V manager, every time that you want to administer Hyper-V. Thus, you need the Hyper-V tools for remote management up and running whenever you need them.

During one of Windows 2008 and Windows 7 deployment projects I've seen an error "Could not process or parse the answer file for [specialize] pass. Please restart."

After hours of investigations I managed to find a solution, and now I'd like to let you know what to do. Here are steps:

1. Press Shift+F10 when you get "Windows could not parse or process unattend answer file"
2. Navigate to the the directories C:\Windows\Panther and C:\Windows\Panther\UnattendGC and review a log files. In one of the logs I've seen the following error:

Creating a large fixed size VHD in Hyper-V can be a lengthy operation.

However Chris, a developer on Hyper-V team, has posted up a utility called VHDTool which can create large fixed VHDs in seconds. The utility is available with source code and can be downloaded here.

All of you, who dialed with SBS knows that SBS MUST be Domain Controller and if it not, the server will reboot itself every hour.

To self-rebooting we need do the following steps:
The main idea to stop self-rebooting is stop the SBCore service. Add a comment

I've been using a Windows Server OS as my laptop / desktop for many years by now.
Currently, I am using Windows Server 2008 R2 as my primary laptop. When I added a Hyper-V role I discovered that "Sleep Mode" on my laptop just stopped working.

After some tests and investigations, I've come up with a partial solution to this problem. The trick to use a Sleep Mode on a system where a Hyper-V installed is to have Hyper-V NOT started.
To set a Hyper-V to "Manual Start", I did a script with a following registry setting: Add a comment

This blog discusses running a Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) in a Virtual Machine (VM) on top of a Hyper-V host. Running a cluster in a virtualized environment is commonly referred to as "Guest Clustering".

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With the release of Data Protection Manager 2010, DPM adds significant scalability, reliability, and manageability enhancements such as:

• Up to 100 servers, 1000 laptops, or 2000 databases protected by a single DPM server

• Significant auto-protection, auto-healing, and reduced alerting for a more “fire and forget” experience

• Enhanced disaster recovery options for long-distance data protection and business continuity initiatives

Of course DPM 2010 offers key new capabilities when used with Hyper-V R2 such as:

• Protection of Live Migration-enabled servers running on CSV in Hyper-V R2

• Flexibility to protect virtual machines from Windows guests or from the hypervisor host

• Ability to restore virtual machines to an alternative host

• Host-based backups will now enable item level recovery (ILR) from within the VHD