Recently I acquired some server class hardware (Dell PowerEdge 2950) and I thought, hey this is a great opportunity for me to setup a virtual environment at home so I can test out some beta products and do some tinkering with Linux. I have VMWare Workstation installed inside of Windows Vista machine at home and I have ubuntu 8.10 running in it and this seems to work ok but I have come across some issues with it that annoy me.
I was undecided on whether to install VMWare ESXi or Windows 2008 Hyper-V server. Based on the title of this article you can probably guess which route I took. I didn't decide to do this simply because I think Microsoft's virtualization platform is superior...I chose it simply because I use VMWare ESXi and ESX at work and was interested in seeing the capabilities of this free product in comparison.
After configuring the server with RAID 0 (faster and this is test) I popped the disk in and started installing. Truth be told the installation was a breeze...so much so in fact that I started the install, watched a soccer game and when I came back it was ready for me to login. I was a little confiused at first because at no point did I provide a username and password for the admin account but it prompted me at the login screen. Didn't take long to figure out it was Administrator/-blank- to login.
This all seemed a little too good to be true and I quickly found out that it was...after downloading and installing the Hyper-V Manager MMC into my vista machine I found I could not connect to the server. found this odd as the very purpose of this server is too allow connections. Turns out there were a few steps I had to do:
- I had to add my user account (the vista one) to the server in order to pass my creds through. I believe that once you have connected to it you can turn this off via the Hyper-V settings panel.
- I had to turn off the server's firewall (I know, I know this is a bad thing but its a test box that will never see the outside world so...). You can use the following command netsh firewall set opmode disable
- I was able to connect to the server...BUT when I tried to create a machine I would get an error about Access Denied. So I added myself to the Administrators group on the server. At this point I can now use MMC to do most admin work on the server from my Vista client
- I then started getting the following when trying to connect: Hyper-V Access Denied. Unable to establish communication between ‘SERVER’ and ‘CLIENT’ . Funny thing is it would let me create a virtual machine but I could never seem to connect to it. This one was quite confusing so I turned to my trusty friend Google to help me resolve this...I came across a blog post of one Adrian Dimcev here and it had the solution I was looking for. Word for word heres the instructions from his site:
- Click Start, Run, type DCOMCNFG. Click OK.
- Expand Component Services, expand Computers. Right-click on My Computer and click on Properties.
- Click on COM Security.
- In the Access Permission area, click Edit Limits.
- Select ANONYMOUS LOGON in the Group or User Name area. Then set the Permissions for ANONYMOUS LOGON to Allow for Remote Access.
- After the previous breakthrough I got the following error (oh joy) : The application encountered an error when attempting to change the state of the 'machinename'. The hypervisor is not running....WHAT????? Ummmm yes it is......
Ok turns out there is a very good reason for this as explained here in this Microsoft article. All I had to do here was enable hardware-assisted virtualization in the BIOS. After doing that it I was able to create my first machine in this environment == Ubuntu 9.
After reading a little further on the internet it seems that my setup at home (using a workgroup) is not the best way to do this and is partly to blame for some of mine and other peoples issues. All in all the installation was a success but seems a little more confusing than installing ESXi. Either way my environment is up and running.