Hyper-V with a High Performance Video Card

I’ve been needing a new demo machine for myself and finally bought a Dell Studio 16 – i7 processor (4 cores) and 8 gigs of ram.

The only problem is that when you turn on the Hyper-V role, the system becomes unstable and BSODs because of the high end video card.  For some stories, check here and here and here.

I finally gave up and installed VMWare and everything works great.  I’m a total Microsoft kind of person.  I love not having to install anything I don’t have to, but I had to.

Hyper-V just isn’t ready to handle these new processors and new video cards.  VMWare is.

And after all that, VMWare just works.  It comes with all the virtual networks set up.  They just work.  There is a setting to optimize disk for performance by not waiting for disk write.  This is perfect for demo machines.

Once Microsoft remedies the Hyper-V situation, I’ll gladly switch back.

Hyper-V Networking

Maybe I’m the only one, but I put one of my new Hyper-V imgages into a difficult state the other day by choosing the wrong network type.  What I mean by this is that when Server 2008 came up (for the first time) and saw it was on the network (it was bound to the virtual NIC attached to the physical NIC on my laptop) it asked me if I was on a public network, home network or work network.  I wasn’t thinking and said it was a public network.  That makes it harder to access your VM as a UNC.  I don’t know all the differences to these different settings, but I do know that if you choose public, that it isn’t discoverable from the netbios name.

Make sure you use either Home or Work network.