A while back I documented the process for doing a Sysprep on a Windows 2003 installation. Well, that same process works for a Windows XP installation. The sysprep GUI on Windows XP is slightly different, but you only need to make sure that the “MiniSetup” and “Pre-Activate” options are selected before pressing the Reseal button and shutting down the machine.
Here are the instructions to run Sysprep on Windows 2003.
Last Friday on the Virtual PC Guy's WebLog, Ben Armstrong, Virtual Machine program manager at Microsoft, posted a registry code snippet to mount vhd files by double clicking on them, and dismount them by using the right-click menu. You can get the code from here. I also recommend that you check out VPC guy’s blog every once in a while – his posts are always useful and interesting.
One of the features available in the latest Beta of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 is the support for the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). VSS is a feature of Windows 2003 server that takes “snaphots” of files, and allows you to quickly create a backup copy of a volume.
For an application to support VSS, it needs to get to a consistent state, freeze, and the perform the shadow copy. Once the shadow copy is created, the application thaws and resumes operations. If an application does not have a VSS provider, VSS cannot guarantee that the resulting shadow copy will be consistent. That is one of the best features of this technology – the actual applications (called “Writers” in VSS-speak) are involved in the creation of the shadow copy, so they can verify that whatever goes into the copy can be later restored without any problems.
By supporting VSS, backup programs (“Requestors”) can now tell Virtual Server that a backup is going to take place. Virtual Server can then make sure that the Virtual Machines are in a consistent state (I”m not sure if it suspends the VMs – I’m currently in the process of finding out that information), and tell the requestor that it is ready for the copy. According to the documentation, creating a shadow copy is very fast – for large volumes I’ve heard numbers of around 30 seconds to 4 minutes. This can also work for quickly cloning a Virtual Server host to another server, so that VMs can resume operations very quickly even if the system goes down.
You can now download Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 BETA2 from http://connect.microsoft.com. As with other beta software, you need to register for the beta first.
This release is pretty significant because it is the first version to support both AMD-V and Intel-VT hardware virtualization. From the release notes, it includes:
- AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) compatibility
- Intel Virtualization Technology (IVT) compatibility
- Volume Shadow Copy Service support
- Offline VHD mounting
- Active Directory integration using service connection points
- Host Clustering technical white paper
The best part is that you can upgrade existing installations very easily:
I just upgraded my 32–bit workstation, and everything is working like a charm.
When you make a Virtual Server deployment, make sure that you follow Microsoft’s recommended Best practices for Virtual Server. They can improve the performance of Virtual Server installations, and make your life as a system administrator easier.
One important thing that many people overlook when creating multiple VMs is the importance of using Sysprep. I wrote a quick walkthrough here, and you can find documentation on Microsoft’s website about it as well. Sysprep makes sure that each cloned virtual machine will be unique – not using it may introduce security and performance issues in your network.
This code allows you to retrieve the information for Virtual Server’s performance counters from C#. It reads both the Virtual Machines and Virtual Processors counters.
1: PerformanceCounterCategory vmCat =
new PerformanceCounterCategory("Virtual Machines");
2: PerformanceCounterCategory vpCat =
new PerformanceCounterCategory("Virtual Processors");
3: string[] vmInstances = vmCat.GetInstanceNames();
4: string[] vpInstances = vpCat.GetInstanceNames();
5:
6: List<PerformanceCounter> countersList =
new List<PerformanceCounter>();
7:
8: foreach (string instance in vmInstances){ 9: PerformanceCounter[] counters =
vmCat.GetCounters(instance);
10: foreach (PerformanceCounter pc in counters)
11: { 12: countersList.Add(pc);
13: }
14:
15: foreach (string instance in vpInstances)
16: { 17: PerformanceCounter[] counters =
vpCat.GetCounters(instance);
18: foreach (PerformanceCounter pc in counters)
19: { 20: countersList.Add(pc);
21: }
22: }
23:
24: while (true)
25: { 26: System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
27: foreach (PerformanceCounter pc in countersList)
28: { 29: Console.WriteLine(
"{0}:\"{1}\" Counter:{2} Value:{3}", pc.CategoryName, pc.InstanceName,
pc.CounterName, pc.NextValue());
30: }
31: }
Another virtual machine product that has been making a lot of noise lately is Xen, the open source project from Xensource. Xen uses a different approach to virtualization than Virtual Server, called Paravirtualization. In this type of virtualization, the guest OS has to be modified to work with a software interface to the Virtual Machine Monitor, instead of thinking it is running on the hardware. The thing is that this actually enables better performance of the Guest OS, as it aware that is running on a virtual machine environment. Xen also supports running unmodified OSes, but for that it is mandatory to have hardware virtualization (VT-x on Intel or SVM on AMD CPUs).
The next releases of Windows Virtualization are implementing a similar approach. It will still be pure virtualization, but the Guest OS will also be enlightened. What this means is that the Guest OS will be aware that it is running on a VM, so it will be able to increase the performance using a modified kernel. The best part about all this is that Microsoft and Xensource are actually working together to make sure that the technology included with Windows Virtualization will be compatible with the technology used in Xen. So, at the end, we, the customers, win. 
This code snippet allows you to connect to a remote instance of Virtual Server 2005 R2, via WMI, and retrieve all the Virtual Machine WMI objects.
1:
2: System.Management.ConnectionOptions co =
3: new System.Management.ConnectionOptions();
4: co.Username = user;
5: co.Password = password;
6:
7: ManagementScope scope = new ManagementScope(
8: new ManagementPath(@"\\"+computer+
@"\root\vm\virtualserver"),co); 9:
10: scope.Connect();
11: SelectQuery oq =
12: new SelectQuery("SELECT * FROM VirtualMachine"); 13:
14: ManagementObjectSearcher searcher =
15: new ManagementObjectSearcher(scope, oq);
16:
17: foreach (ManagementObject queryObj in searcher.Get())
18: { 19: //Do something
20: }
You need to provide a user and password with enough credentials to query the Virtual Server instance.
BTW, if you ever need to format your code for display on the web, check out this website.
“Carmine” (System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Beta 1) is available for download! You first need to register for the beta at http://connect.microsoft.com, and then login into http://connect.microsoft.com/vmm/downloads with your passport Id.
I just finished downloading it and will start playing with it soon. Too bad that calling into VMM from Powershell and the functionality to convert from a physical machine to a virtual machine are not included in this beta.
Accessing Virtual Server’s COM objects from .NET is not as direct as just including the references to the COM classes. In order to instantiate to the Virtual Server object, you need to have the proper COM permissions. For Virtual Server, the required impersonation level must be Impersonation or higher.
There are two ways to achieve this:
- The first one is to use Component Services to change the Default Impersonation Level to Impersonate. To do this in the Component Service console, go to Computers->My Computer->Properties, and the setting is in the Default Properties tab. This has obvious security implications, though.
- The second method is to do it programatically. This can be a bit painful if you’re not familiar with COM and COM Security. You have basically two options:
- Use the method described in the Virtual Server Programming Guide, that you can find here: .
- You can also use an alternative method, described by Virtual PC Guy in his blog as a solution to connect to Virtual Server from Powershell. You can check the link to review the code, which consists in using the CoSetProxyBlanket function, that according to the documentation “Sets the authentication information that will be used to make calls on the specified proxy.” Implementing a class similar to the one described on the linked page should work and is much simpler than the recommended approach descrbied in the Programming Guide.