What’s the first thing you do when you install a product like Hyper-V? Exactly! Install an unsupported Guest OS

I downloaded the latest version of PC-BSD just to have a look-see. (I like to play around with operating systems other than Windows but after a while I always return to Windows; I actually need to get some work done too )

So, I booted the PCBSD DVD and I was surprised how smooth the PCBSD installer was running.

But when I was done playing around with BSD I wanted to shut down the virtual machine. This proved to be a little harder than I expected.

The virtual machine just wouldn’t shutdown and all the menu items were grayed out. After some trial and error I found out that this behavior was caused by the Legacy Network adapter.

Well, at least I learned one thing: don’t set your virtual machine to auto-start after a server reboot when your are playing with an unsupported OS!

Last week I installed the free Hyper-V server from Microsoft and I LOVE IT. I installed it on a home made box with 4 250GB HDD’s in RAID-0. And with RAID-0 I mean the cheap-ass Intel Fake-RAID stuff. I upgraded my CPU to a Core2 Quad and upped my RAM to 8GB.

After downloading the DVD I inserted it, clicked through the Windows 2008 setup (all my hardware was identified immediately) waited for about 15 minutes and I was… uuuh… wait… where do I start the management console? Ok, this might be a good time to RTFM.

Turned out, you need to install the management console on a Vista box. No problem, my company laptop comes with Vista . Getting the management console to run was kinda tricky but I got it running using this step-by-step guide.

<whisper> not having the Explorer installed doesn’t mean you cannot install something like FreeCommander </whisper>