Say it like you mean it: Hyper-V Baby

I decided to dive into Hyper-V, I went to Future Shop and purchased an Acer Desktop with an AMD Phenom Quad Core processor, 8Gb of RAM and a 750Gb SATA disk (not bad for under a grand!).  I need to add another few SATA disks for my Virtual Machines but that will come later.

AMD makes a utility named AMD Virtualization Technology and Microsoft Hyper-V System Compatibility Check Utility – This utility checks your system’s capabilities to facilitate testing of Microsoft Hyper-V on platforms with AMD microprocessors in case you are curious, the Acer system passed no problem.

I wiped the machine and installed Windows 2008 x64 Core, if you’re not into the command-line you can use the new CoreConfigurator utility it will help out quite a bit and rescue you from that dreaded command-line. 

I added the following roles to my Core install:

• Active Directory Domain Controller
• DNS Server
• Hyper-V

I immediately upgraded my install of Hyper-V to RC0, after that I activated my copy of Windows 2008 and enabled Automatic Updates.  The TechNet article "Server Core Installation Option of Windows Server 2008 Step-by-Step Guide" comes in handy for tweaking the various options in Core.

I created four Windows 2008 virtual machines, three of them were 64-bit guests and the fourth was 32-bit (TFS Application Tier) using the Hyper-V Admin tool for Vista which you can download here:

x86: Update for Windows Vista (KB949758)
x64: Update for Windows Vista x64 Edition (KB949758)

Having .iso files for all your installation DVDs will make things go more quickly.

You’ll notice that after the install of the virtual machine and adding the "Integration Support" you’ve still got no mouse, or LAN adapter.  You will need to make an .iso with the Hyper-V RC0 patches so you can patch your virtual machines running Windows 2008 x64/x32, this will enable the mouse support and LAN adapter for your Windows 2008 VMs.