Virtualisation

XP Mode (Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7) no longer requires hardware virtualisation - hurrah !

Liam Westley — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:25:14 GMT

Windows Virtual PC (aka XP Mode)

When XP Mode was released, it insisted on hardware virtualisation being present on your CPU and enabled in the BIOS. Given that Windows Virtual PC was based on an improved Virtual PC 2007, which provided hardware virtualisation as a user selectable option, I did wonder why on earth Microsoft thought this was a good idea.

Not only do many people not have a CPU with hardware virtualisation support, some manufacturers don't provide a BIOS option to enable this setting, especially on laptops - yes Sony, Toshiba and Acer, I'm looking at you.

Dumb and dumber

This issue became a double whammy; not only was Microsoft a bit dumb on not supporting Windows Virtual PC without hardware virtualisation, your hardware manufacturer was also dumb in not supporting the option in the BIOS.

Microsoft update to Windows Virtual PC

Belatedly, Microsoft has seen the problem with this hardware virtualisation requirement and has now released a new version of Windows Virtual PC that works without hardware virtualisation. This is really good news for those with older (or limited) CPUs and rubbish BIOS firmware.

You can details of how to download the new versions of XP Mode here,

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2010/03/18/windows-virtual-pc-no-hardware-virtualization-update-now-available-for-download.aspx

And there is also an explanation of why the hardware virtualisation requirement was in place for previous releases,

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2010/03/18/windows-virtual-pc-now-without-the-need-for-hardware-virtualization.aspx

Thanks to NxtGenUG Manchester - Hyper-V for Developers presentation now available for download

Liam Westley — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:16:06 GMT

Thanks to Steve and Andy at NxtGenUG Manchester for making me very welcome and for the guys who didn't head down the pub for a Guinness for St Patrick's Day and came to NxtGen instead. I hope you all got something from the presentation, if not technical insights, at least a can of Guinness of Tunnocks caramel wafer as swag.

As promised here is the presentation in both PowerPoint and Adobe PDF format (with speaker notes),

http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugmanc/hyperv4devs-ppt.zip

http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugmanc/hyperv4devs-pdf.zip

Since I gave the presentation Microsoft has released XP Mode (Windows Virtual PC for use under Windows 7) without the requirement for hardware virtualisation. Read more about that here, http://blogs.msdn.com/Virtual_PC_Guy/

For anyone who has seen this presentation at other user groups, there is a new section at the end of the presentation dealing with the various networking configurations under Hyper-V; not connected, private network, internal network and external network. This includes details of what these mean, and a Venn diagram to aid understanding of the implications.

Running Remote Desktop Connection client (mstsc.exe) from inside Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

Liam Westley — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:45:16 GMT

One of the annoying absences in Hyper-V Server 2008 is the lack of a remote desktop connection client (mstsc.exe). This is due to the (welcome) reduction in clutter within Server 2008 Core, on which Hyper-V Server is based.

However, a remote connection client allows you to logon at a Hyper-V server console and then remote connect to the virtual machines directly which can be quite useful.

Thanks to this blog by Jason Huitt, http://jasonhuitt.com/blog/post/Server-Core-2008-No-Built-In-MSTSC.aspx, I discovered it's just a matter of copying the relevant files from a matching Windows Server 2008 installation. In my case I copied the files from Windows Server 2008 R2, and had to include an additional file msacm32.dll which wasn't listed on Jason's blog.

\Windows\System32\mstsc.exe
\Windows\System32\mstscax.dll
\Windows\System32\msacm32.dll
\Windows\System32\en-US\mstsc.exe.mui
\Windows\System32\en-US\mstscax.dll.mui

Once you install these files into the relevant folders in your \Windows area on your Hyper-V Server you can just use the command line to run mstsc.exe and you can start to connecting to all the virtual machines on which you have enabled remote connection. Great if your VMs are running on an internal network not visible outside the Hyper-V host.

Hyper-V for Developers presentation - GL.NET, Gloucester

Liam Westley — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:30:20 GMT

Thanks to Jimmy Skowronski and the guys at Gloucester.NET user group for inviting me over to give my Hyper-V for Developers talk. Additional thanks to Marc Gravell for giving me a lift from Gloucester town to Symantec (kindly providing facilities) and for DevExpress for supplying the pizzas for tonights user group.

As promised, here are the slides to download as either PDF or PowerPoint,

http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/glnet/Hyperv4Devs-PDF.zip

http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/glnet/Hyperv4Devs-PPT.zip

I really enjoyed the chance to talk for 90 minutes, rather than usual 60 mintues I'm used to as it gave the topic time to breathe as well as discuss Hyper-V features with experienced VMWare ESX users. Good to learn more stuff about the VMWare products.

Thanks

Liam

UPDATE 18 February 2010 : Following Greg's question regarding Type 1 / Type 2 categorisation (see below) I thought I'd post a direct link to the free PDF eBook, Understanding Microsoft Virtualization R2 Solutions, which you can download from here.

Hyper-V for Developers - UK tour dates

Liam Westley — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:49:22 GMT

For those who would like to know when I'll be presenting my Hyper-V for Developers talk around the UK, to see if they can pop in, here's the latest dates (always subject to change),

13th August 2009		DevEvening, Woking
16th September 2009		Edge UG, London
14th January 2010		NxtGenUG, Southampton

17th February 2010		GL.Net, Gloucester (details)
17th March 2010		NxtGenUG, Manchester (details)
25th March 2010		.Net Developers Network, Bristol (details)

8th May 2010		DDD Scotland (if voted in, vote here)

13th May 2010		VBUG, Bracknell (details tbc here)
9th June 2010		NxtGenUG, Oxford (details)
15th July 2010		North East Bytes, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (details tbc here)

Phew! That's nearly a 12 month tour, but the eagle eyed may have spotted that April is free at the moment. So if any UK user group thinks they have members who haven't seen my Hyper-V presentation, and meets on a Thursday (or every other Wednesday) then drop me a line and we'll see what we can arrange.

Using Gnome Partition Editor (GParted) to transfer Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server R2 images to different drive; but you'll need a Windows 7 Recovery Disc to actually get it to boot

Liam Westley — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:51:02 GMT

UPDATE 15 February 2010 : See Virtual PC Guy's Blog here for a crucial item of information about the Windows Startup repair not restoring the Hyper-V service as an automated service. Basically once you reboot, although the o/s loads, you cannot run any virtual machines. To resolve this you should remote login to the Hyper-V Server (or direct for Windows Sever 2008 R2) and execute the following command; bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

I had recently successfully used Gnome Partition Editor (GParted) to resize some of my Virtual Machines running under VirtualBox (see http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/122/26/). So I decided that maybe it was time to use GParted on some real hard drive disk partitions.

I had freed up a larger hard drive for my Hyper-V laptop, so I used GParted to transfer the volumes from the original (internal eSata drive) to an external drive caddy (eSata drive, but connected via USB 2.0). There were three volumes on the original drive; a 100Mb system boot partition, a 20Gb Hyper-V R2 partition and a 60Gb Windows Server 2008 R2 partition.

Using GParted from a USB key

A spare 'bingmaps' 2Gb USB thumbdrive boot the whole of GParted from a USB key, see http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php. Nothing like a Microsoft freebie allowing me to run open source software.

Although the boot partition copied successfully, it looked like I couldn't copy the main NTFS partitions, as it kept failing. However, that was just a case of needing to make the new partitions at least slightly bigger than the original. I had neglected to do this with the Hyper-V partition as I was trying to maximise my Windows Server 2008 R2 partition. So, once the main partitions were successfully copied, I expectantly rebooted. The reboot failed. Back in GParted, I realised I'd forgotten to flag the 100Mb system boot partition on the new drive as a BOOT partition.

Bootmgr - you can't boot Vista, WIndows 7 or 2008 after using GParted

However, on rebooting, although I got to view the boot menu, selecting either operating system failed. I encountered the issue mentioned in the blog that talked about resizing virtual machines; any operating system after Windows Vista uses the more modern Boot Manager (Bootmgr) rather than the old fashioned NTLOADER and BOOT.INI menu system. This means both Hyper-V Server R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 both refused to boot due to warnings about missing and/or corrupt files.

Using the standard Hyper-V R2 or Windows 2008 R2 install discs, and selecting the Repair Option turned out to be no help as there was is option to repair the boot options. I searched and found, http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=13803, which mentioned a Windows Server 2008 Recovery Disk but what the hell was that, not something I could find elsewhere? Another search found a superuser.com question, http://superuser.com/questions/47454/vista-server-2008-bootmgr-is-missing, and that gave away what was required; I definitely needed a recovery disk, possibly Vista, or better still, Windows 7.

Windows 7 recovery disk to the rescue

Before booting up Windows 7, I did check out a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine to see if it provided an option to create a recovery disk, it did not. So it was off to my development laptop which runs Windows 7 (the workstation o/s that matches the 2008 R2 server release, like XP matches Server 2003 and Vista matches Server 2008). That did have an option to make a recovery disk. Minutes later I booted my Hyper-V laptop from that newly created Windows 7 recovery CD, and unlike the Windows Server 2008 installation CDs, it immediately notified me of a boot manager issue and removed the 'old' entries, and created 'new' entries for the Windows installations it had found on the drive.

After a reboot the only difference was that the menu now had '(recovered)' on the end of my boot menu options, but apart from that everything working exactly as before on the new drive. A quick use of the utility bcedit (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms791534.aspx) had my boot menu friendly descriptions back to normal.

So, in my 'it pro' toolbox there is now a USB thumb drive ready to run GParted, and a Windows 7 recovery CD to fix any boot manager issues that it might cause.

Hyper-V for Developers presentation - NxtGenUG Southampton

Liam Westley — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:54:13 GMT

Thanks to John and the guys at NxtGenUG Southampton for the invitation to come down to and present on Hyper-V for Developers tonight. And thanks to the tips, definitely have new stuff to look into, will look into PowerTab for improving my PowerShell experience (thanks to Rob Cooper aka @robcthegeek).

I’ll also take the hint of using a proper ‘Southampton’ image. Next time you’ll have the Titanic as a desktop background instead of the mighty Spitfire whose first test flights were from Eastleigh airport (now Southampton International airport).

You can download a ZIP of the PowerPoint presentation file here,

http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugsoton/HyperV4DevPPT.zip

Or download a ZIP of a full PDF of the presentation, including the Speaker notes here,

http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugsoton/HyperV4DevPdf.zip

How to enable RemoteApp (via RDP 7.0) within VirtualBox or VMWare running Windows 7, Vista SP1+ or Windows XP SP3

Liam Westley — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:53:17 GMT

UDPATE 20 February 2010 : Sorry for how long the final solution took to discover, but thanks to Aaron Parker's blog entry at http://blog.stealthpuppy.com we now have the final missing pieces that allow remote applications to be hosted within a standard Windows XP SP3 virtual machine.

I have just tested the settings from Aaron on a Windows XP SP3 image running under VirtualBox 3.1.2 which previously failed with the dreaded 'The remote computer does not support RemoteApp ..'. As soon as the two extra settings were added to the RDP file (see steps c and d below), I could run Notepad via RemoteApp quite happily. I'll be doing more research into this and will update some of the screen shots in this post, but I thought I'd post this update as soon as possible to help people right away.

What is RemoteApp?

This is used within the XP Mode within Windows 7 to provide seamless application integration where applications running under Windows XP appear as application windows floating over the Windows 7 desktop.

RemoteApp is only the remote display technology which enables this to occur. It should be noted that XP Mode also includes logic to integrate start menu items and saving of documents and files which are not covered by RemoteApp alone.

Why would you want RemoteApp?

For all those people using XP Mode to run a nicely sandboxed IE6 for testing purposes, you can now achieve exactly the same result without having to install Virtual PC. This is important if you are already running virtual machines in another platform, such as VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation (or Player) as running Virtual PC XP Mode has a habit of causing your other virtual machines to crash with very little warning.

Also, unlike XP Mode, seamless mode in VirtualBox or ‘unity’ mode in VMWare Workstation, you can use this on a non local virtual machine. So you could happily have a network server with IE6 instances pooled for all developers. With VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation this also means we can use an application on 64-bit or multi CPU installations which XP Mode does not support.

Step 1 - Configuring the guest virtual machine to allow RemoteApp access

For Windows Vista and Windows XP you will need to install updates on the guest to enable RemoteApp (see below). Windows 7 requires now such updates.

This example uses a completely clean version of Windows 7 Ultimate RTM 64-bit, dual CPU, running under VirtualBox 3.1. We are going to enable Notepad to be run as a RemoteApp. The connecting client is Windows 7 Ultimate RC 64-bit, dual CPU.

This solution involved directly editing the registry, and this is not the ideal way of enabling RemoteApp, and I have omitted numerous registry keys which would be required by XP Mode (see resources for full registry value list). This is a minimal bootstrap to enable RemoteApp until the virtualisation and remote desktop teams provide suitable tools and fully document the process.

1. Enable remote desktop connections on the guest.

2. Run regedit (registry editor) and locate the key TsAppAllowList

     a) New Key, Applications.
     b) Under Applications, create New Key, 1234567 (the key name is not important, we just need any key for next two steps)
     c) In the new key, Create New -> String Value, Name. Set value to Notepad
     d) Also in the new key, Create New -> String Value, Path. Set to c:\windows\system32\Notepad.exe

3. Navigate back to the TsAppAllowList branch

a) Edit fDisableAllowList value, and set to 1

Step 2 – Creating the RDP file to access the RemoteApp

Now the guest operating system has a RemoteApp created we need to use a Remote Desktop Connection to access that application.

1. Run remote desktop connection, setup your desired settings as you would in a normal connection
2.. Save the settings to an RDP file.

3) Use Notepad to open the RDP file to edit the configuration file,

   a) Modify the setting; remoteapplicationmode:i:0 to remoteapplicationmode:i:1
   b) Add the setting; remoteapplicationprogram:s:Notepad
   c) Add the setting; disableremoteappcapscheck:i:1
   d) Add the setting; alternate shell:s:rdpinit.exe
   e) Save the RDP file

(20th February 2010 - thanks again to Aaron Parker's blog for steps c and d)

4. You can now use the RemoteApp by double clicking on the RDP to open with Remote Desktop Connection,

a) Click on Connect when you see the security warning

b) And after a short start to initiate the remote desktop session you will be running notepad floating over your VM

Setting a Timeout for RDP connections

When using RemoteApp one of the issues you may find is that when you exit the application that does not close the Remote session on the guest machine. This is clear on a desktop operating system as you will receive warning messages about users already being logged into the system.
Clearly this is less than ideal, so I decided to find out how to ensure that closing the application caused the user to logout in a very short time period. This is configured on the guest operating system.

1. Windows key, Edit Group Policy.
2. Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Remote Desktop Session Host -> Session Time Limits
3.Double click 'Set time limit for disconnected sessions', change to Enabled, set to 1 Minute.

Final thought

Similar to VirtualBox seamless mode, you will not be able to move the floating guest application window between monitors, unless you save the RDP to use all monitors available. Either set this option prior to saving the RDP file, or edit the RDP setting multimon:i:1.

Summary

As the keen eyed may have spotted, my laptop is still running the Release Candidate of Windows 7 as I have been too busy recently to upgrade to the RTM version. However, over Christmas I will be upgrading the laptop to RTM and I’m glad I did, because I RemoteApp means there will be absolutely no need to install Virtual PC and XP Mode when I can just run IE6 under VMWare or VirtualBox instead.

Patches for Windows XP and Vista

To enable Windows XP SP3 or Vista SP1 (or higher) to host remote applications you will need to install one of the following patches.

Update for Windows® XP SP3 to enable RemoteApp™ (KB961742)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2f376f53-83cf-4e5b-9515-2cb70662a81b&displaylang=en

Update for Windows® Vista SP1 or above to enable RemoteApp™, (KB961741)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=097B7478-3150-4D0D-A85A-6451F32C459C&displaylang=en

Resources

The original article which started all this, from Ben Armstrong, Virtualization Program Manager at Microsoft ‘Virtual PC Guy’s blog’, http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/12/17/remoteapp-hyper-v-windows-xp-vista.aspx

.. which led to Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) Team Blog that revealed it’s all an RDP 7.0 thing, and not Hyper-V is just an enabling technology, http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/2009/12/15/remoteapp-for-hyper-v.aspx

... as Aaron Parker suggested by including a VirtualBox example on his stealthpuppy blog, http://blog.stealthpuppy.com/virtualisation/remoteapp-for-hyper-v-hyper-what

20th February 2010 update ... and it was Aaron Parker's blog post here that revealed the final missing settings in the RDP file that allowed me to finally run a RemoteApp from within a Windows XP SP3 virtual machine.

Once I knew the TsAllowAppList registry key was involved I Bing later I found the very useful XP Mode analysis of this key at the C# Snippets blog, http://c-sharp-snippets.blogspot.com/2009/09/creating-shortcut-to-application-inside.html

And for RDP configuration file editing, I found an excellent clue in Paul Monaghan’s article here, http://support.yourofficeanywhere.co.uk/Customer/KBArticle.aspx?articleid=82

... which helped me guess that changing the remoteapplicationmode:i:0 value to 1 would help, and if you Bing remoteapplicationmode:i:1 then the careless folk at financelogix.com have kindly published their RDP file with the application name key within it, which gave me the last piece of the jigsaw.

Finally the ‘Set time limit for disconnected sessions’, example may be for Windows XP but gave enough information for Windows 7, http://howtonetworking.com/casestudy/tstimelimit1.htm

Multi monitor support for a Windows 7 guest operating system under VirtualBox, for different sized monitors

Liam Westley — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:46:00 GMT

This nugget was generated by a fellow developer from the London .Net User Group who was trying to use multiple monitors with a virtual machine running under VirtualBox. His guest operating system was Windows 7, and he was attaching from a Windows XP host operating system.

I did suggest he might look at VMWare Workstation to run guest operating systems and this happily supports multiple monitors, even if the monitors are different sizes. Even the latest free VMWare Player can handle multiple monitors, and Aero, and event better it can now create new virtual machines.

However, if your preference is for Sun's VirtualBox product, multiple monitors can only be achieved by using a remote desktop connection. Older version of remote desktop (prior to v7.0) can handle mulitple monitors by using the /span command line switch but this requires monitors that are the same resolution and creates a single desktop across all monitors.

The good news, is that with the release of RDP 7, you can now use remote desktop connection to connect from Windows XP SP3 into a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 system and you can use full feature multiple monitors. You need the support on the destination operating system, it must be running RDP 7 for remote connecitons, and only Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 7 Ultimate support multiple monitors via RDP.

Here is a good explanation from the remote desktop services team at Microsoft,

http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/2009/08/21/remote-desktop-connection-7-for-windows-7-windows-xp-windows-vista.aspx

And the download for Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista can be found here at KB969084,

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969084

I have to admit that I haven't tried to run RDP 7.0 from Windows XP as I long ago deleted Windows XP from any of my machines.

Excellent blog post on how to resize virtual disc partitions under VirtualBox (... and should work for other virtualisation platforms)

Liam Westley — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:45:48 GMT

Via Mehul Harry on Twitter (http://twitter.com/MehulHarry/status/6122948078) I discovered this superbly detailed blog on how to resize a virtual partition running under VirtualBox,

http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/122/26/

There is an issue with resizing Vista paritions with the Gnome Partition Manager, but the fix for that is detailed here,

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-gparted-to-resize-your-windows-vista-partition/

Resizing partitions is always a pain and I like the non destructive nature of this approach. It should be equally applicable for use under Hyper-V Server, Virtual PC or VMWare Workstation.

The next time I need a resize, I might take this approach.