I have posted a guide to writing scripts for Microsoft Hyper-V. Check my website under Papers.

VMware's ESX KO's a roughly built Hyper-V package

"When the dust settled in the lab after two long months of testing Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware's ESX in the areas of performance, compatibility, management, and security, it all boiled down to two issues: experience and religion."

I spent quite a bit of time with both VMware and Hyper-V. I agree with some of what is in this article. VMWare is a more mature product and hence its vm management tools are more robust. VMWare also supports a wider array of non-Windows OS vms. All true. Yet all of what I am virtualizing at this point is Windows, and all of the management I need can be done thru the Hyper-V UI. Hence the question comes down, in my mind, to performance over dollars. In the bang for the buck factor, my bet is still on Hyper-V.

The article in CIO magazine, How Microsoft Hyper-V Helped My IT Shop Revamp Disaster Recovery, details my efforts to reorganize network and recovery operations around storage and server virtualization. It also mentions the year-long virtualization study that I did in 2007/2008.

The release candidate for Hyper-V is now out. I am doing some performance and feature testing. Meantime, here are some times on installing Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2008 Enterprise 64-bit core build.

Name the computer:

• netdom renamecomputer %computername% /newname:<your server name>

Enable remote management:

• On the core server: WinRM quickconfig
• On the client: winrs -r:<your server name> cmd

Set the IP address:

• netsh interface IPv4 show interfaces
• netsh interface ipv4 set address name="Interface" source=static address=192.168.1.10 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.1.1
• netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name="Interface" address=192.168.1.50 index=1

Install Hyper-V:

• Download the Hyper-V RC and copy it onto the server
• wusa.exe Windows6.0-KB950050-x64.msu
• start /w ocsetup.exe Microsoft-Hyper-V