Sunday, March 04, 2012

Windows 8, VirtualBox & Hyper-V

How could I resist...don't tell Corporate IT, but I just spent the weekend installing Windows 8 on my HP 8540w workstation. The install went fine, ended up doing a clean install as the upgrade didn't complete for whatever domain policy reason. I'm mainly interested in Windows 8 because - FINALLY!!!! - Microsoft has a virtualization story for 64 bits. I started out using VirtualPC when I was doing SharePoint 2003 development - to be able to have a server running on my laptop with my own domain, being able to have multiple servers running to simulate my SharePoint production environments, priceless. Then along came SharePoint 2010 and so much for VirtualPC...like many others I had found out about VirtualBox & have become a fan - it's a great piece of software, has been running like a charm for me & my team, but darn it, my production servers are running Hyper-V and it would be nice to try it, but was I willing to install Server 2008 as my host OS? nah.... So here we are with Hyper-V now on Windows 8. I'm kind of hip deep in some development projects so I can't just switch over entirely to it yet, so I thought to install VirtualBox first, to be able to keep on working, then migrate over to Hyper-V. Problem #1...I couldn't enable video acceleration in VirtualBox. Yeah, not a big deal, but I went in to Control Panel & saw it was using the default Microsoft video driver as my graphics card driver. That wasn't going to work...so I installed the latest NVidia graphics driver from the HP 8540w Windows 7 drivers site and I'm good to go. Display looks MUCH nicer too, thank you very much. Problem #2...so I couldn't get to the VirtualBox properties System Acceleration tab - it was grayed out. Tried booting up the VPC & it kept rebooting. The machine settings were correct - IO APIC enabled, enough RAM, 2D video acceleration...but still wouldn't start up Windows. I know my laptop supports processor enhancements, but then thought to remove Hyper-V (Start / Run / appwiz.cpl) and removed Hyper-V....then the acceleration tab is enabled, and the VPC started up just fine. So for now, looks like only one virtualization technology at a time. Soon as my development project dust is done - or next weekend, whichever comes first - I'll get a new Hyper-V dev environment spun up, then it'll be all Hyper-V going forward. Hmm, let's see if I can take my VirtualBox VHD & import them into Hyper-V - be back in a bit!