Hyper-V Integration Services - Vista must be SP1 when a guest for installation

Just had a twitter conversation with a fellow developer and tester Ben Hall regarding Hyper-V Integration Services (think 'additions' or 'VMWare Tools' for Hyper-V) and the limitation that you have to be running Vista as a guest it has to be SP1 to support installation of Integration Services.  If one of your aims is to test software/deployment on non-SP1 Vista that's a bit of a killer.

I found a gerat blog that lists how to 'upgrade' Vista to SP1 so you can install Integration Services,

http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/microsoft-hyper-v-articles/installation-and-deployment/hyper-v-integration-newer-version-windows-vista.html

What is useful in this blog (from my point of view) is that this describes in wonderful step-by-step detail how to get networking running under Vista non-SP1 without Integration Services. At that point you can enable remote desktop connections to the Vista guest and use that to control the VM, rather than use the Hyper-V management tools. 

The issue here, is that without integration services the Hyper-V management tools do not support mouse integration. Personally, I find the remote control under Hyper-V to be equivilant to the HP iLO tools - it amazing how it works all the way from the BIOS screen and through bootup but its way too sloooooow.  So I would always use the Hyper-V remote management tools purely to get networking up and running, and then perform all other tasks via remote desktop connection.

I realise that Integration Services provide other functions, including time synchronisation, but if you can survive without them (use standard time synchronisation services that Windows provides) then Vista non-SP1 is possible under Hyper-V.
Print | posted on Tuesday, December 9, 2008 4:37 PM

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