Workarounds For When “Add Virtual Hard Disk Wizard” Fails (Which Seems To Be All The Time…)

Adding new fixed sized VHDs using the Add Virtual Hard Disk Wizard in the Hyper-V console for some reason has stopped working for me on just about all my installs, with no errors logged. The VHD is created, but the progress slider bar never progresses and it will sit there, forever. It’s got to the point where I don’t use it and haven’t the time to debug the underlying cause.

A GUI-friendly way to work around this problem is to point Computer Management at the Hyper-V host and use Disk Management to Create the VHD.

Another way of doing this quickly is by using VHD Tool – although this doesn’t zero out the VHD and can leak information from the Hyper-V host and previous virtual machine’s disks into the newly created VHD. It is a great tool for lab work though.

Diskpart can also be used to create the VHD from the command line on the Hyper-V host. The command to do this is:

create vdisk file=”d:\path\to\file.vhd” maximum=<size in MB> type=fixed

UPDATE: So apparently I'm getting this error on networks where the domain controllers are still running Windows Server 2003 and an authoritative restore of Active Directory has been performed. The fix for this is to install MSKB 939820 on all the Windows Server 2003-based domain controllers in the affected domain. Interestingly I only found this trying to resolve a System Center Essentials 2010 installation.

Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition - License Change Regarding Virtualisation

The introduction of Hyper-V to all editions of Windows Server 2008 (except Web Edition) has meant there's been a licensing change to the Standard Edition.

The previous editions of Windows Server Standard Edition allowed for 1 instance of Windows Server to be installed as a Physical Operating System Environment (POSE) or as a Virtual Operating System Environment (VOSE). This meant that if you wanted to host a virtualised Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition on say Virtual Server 2005 R2 running on Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition, then you needed to acquire 2 licenses of Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition - one for the physical instance and one for the virtual instance.

The new licensing change brings the Standard Edition in line with the Enterprise Edition. This means that Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition can be installed twice using the one license - once for the physical instance and once for the virtualised instance. The caveat is that the physical instance can only be used for the purposes of hosting the virtualised instance. All the workload for the Standard Edition license is to be performed in the virtualised instance, with the physical instance used to host and maintain the virtualised instance.

More information can be found in the Licensing Information section of the Hyper-V FAQ, Microsoft's Licensing Virtualisation changes and the Volume Licensing Product Use Rights.

MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition Install Problem

I decided to have a look at Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Workgroup Edition to see if it would help me in my management of several clients with multiple Windows servers.
I went to install it in a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine on my SBS2003 server. I installed a new instance of SQL Server 2000 and then upgraded it to SP4. The MOM2005 installer then failed the SQL prerequisite check - no SQL instances found! I then tried installing it on my SBS2003 box. It found only one SQL instance - my WSUS installation, but didn't think it was SP3 or later.
I then proceeded to find MSKB 902803, which gave me a modified msiexec install, but appeared to be targeted to MOM2005 and not the Workgroup Edition. I then managed to find a conversation in an Ars Technica forum. The process in summary is:

Load the registry editor and browse to:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\MSSQLServer\CurrentVersion

Change the CSDVersion key from 8.00.2039 to 8.00.761

Instances can be found at:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\\MSSQLServer\CurrentVersion 

Run MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition setup

Change the value back when you are done.

This was the technique I used to successfully install MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition.