For many years I’ve had to scour the interwebs to find out if hardware virtualization is supported by Mircosoft for a particular product.

I’m not sure how long it has been around but I’ve finally found the Windows Server Catalog site which will simply tell you if it is supported or not:

http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvpwizard.htm

For example I can easily see that SCCM 2007 SP2 on VMWare ESX 3.5 Update 5 with Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 as the guest OS is SUPPORTED!

So simple and so overdue!
 
 

Shared disk options when trying to create a cluster using virtualized nodes within Microsoft Hyper-V are very limited – in fact, only iSCSI will work! You can no longer use a shared SCSI device as you could with older Microsoft virtualization product or like you can with products from VMWare.

I was happy to find that StarWind offers a free iSCSI Target Server (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) – it’s very simple to install and share out storage and best of all it is free – great for test / dev environments.

Gavin McShera has a fantastic step-by-step guide on how to set up a 2008 cluster in a Hyper-V environment over here –> http://blogs.technet.com/pfe-ireland/archive/2008/05/16/how-to-create-a-windows-server-2008-cluster-within-hyper-v-using-simulated-iscsi-storage.aspx

Looks quite nice. New features include:

Register at:

http://www.virtualization.info/2008/11/vmware-opens-converter-40-beta-program.html