Windows 2008 with Hyper-V on a Dell Latitude D830

My new work laptop for Quest is a Dell Latitude D830 running Windows XP. I gave XP another shot, and after a day I’d switched back to my Macbook Pro. I needed to use some of the XP-only apps, so I virtualized the XP image, and set about turning the Dell into my mobile datacenter.

Windows 2008 Standard installs fine, but doesn’t have drivers for:

• Video card – NVidia Quadro 140M – go to support.dell.com and download the Vista 64-bit drivers
• Wireless network card – still working on this one
• Bluetooth – don’t install the Dell Vista drivers for this.  It doesn’t work.  I don’t need it anyway, but just thought I’d try it.

Hyper-V works great so far.  It’s no replacement for VMware Workstation or VMware ESX/VI.  Had a few minor problems, but nothing big:

• Can’t easily copy a VM.  Have to export it, then import it again, and you have to be careful about how you handle folder paths.
• Can’t make templates.  VMware handles this with Virtual Center, and I’m hoping Microsoft will come out with a similar add-on product to make it easier to quickly scale out multiple servers.
• There’s some network strangeness when you use a laptop with both a wired connection and a WiFi connection.  It’s not obvious how to get the VMs to switch back and forth between the two.  I’ll probably need to write up a guide on this once I get the wireless adapter working, because I haven’t seen anything about it online yet.  With VMware, you can put the wired and wireless adapters on the same virtual switch, and the changes are transparent to the guests (or as Windows calls them, partitions).
• Windows 2008 doesn’t have iSCSI target support built in.  I’d love to have this so that I could have a little farm on here and quickly switch drives inside the OS’s, but no dice.  I’ve been looking at a couple of iSCSI target add-on software packages, but it’s not worth the $200-$300 price, especially when those licenses only support a few guests.

I’m loving Hyper-V so far, though.  It’s not as good as ESX, but it’s a heck of a strong product for a first version.