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:

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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
4. 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.
5. 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.

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