Peter Bernier's questions

I'm trying to start a VM on a new Hyper-V installation and I'm receiving the following error:

The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running. The following actions may help you resolve the problem:

1) Verify that the processor of the physical computer has a supported version of hardware-assisted virtualization.

2) Verify that hardware-assisted virtualization and hardware-assisted data execution protection are enabled in the BIOS of the physical computer. (If you edit the BIOS to enable either setting, you must turn off the power to the physical computer and then turn it back on. Resetting the physical computer is not sufficient.)

3) If you have made changes to the Boot Configuration Data store, review these changes to ensure that the hypervisor is configured to launch automatically.

My machine supports virtualization at the hardware level and it is enabled in BIOS.

Why am I receiving this error?

I'm running into some difficulties getting pass-through disks to be accessible to a Hyper-v server 2003 r2 virtual machine.

Host OS : Server 2008 R2 full w/Hyper-V role

Guest OS : Server 2003 R2 (Windows Home Server)

The guest's OS disk is a pass-through disk on the IDE controller (not the best solution, but I can live with it). My storage disks will be pass-through disks on the SCSI controller. I'm able to see all of the disks that I'll be using for the VM on the host without issue.

The problem that I'm having is that I can't seem to get the guest OS to be able to 'see' the storage drives (as pass-through disks on the SCSI controller).

Here's what I'm doing :

• On the host, the storage drive is set to 'Offline' just like the OS disk (this is required for pass-through to work).
• In the VM, the storage drive is on the SCSI controller.
• Hyper-V Integration Tools are installed in guest.

That's as far as I'm able to get. I don't see the drive in Computer Management, or in Windows Explorer (I've tried with an unformatted disk, as well as after formatting a partition). I am able to see a removable device that lists the disk's model number in the Guest, but I can't seem to access the storage. (I get an entry in Device Manager that needs drivers, but nothing on the Integration Tools disc works..)

Trouble-shooting steps I've tried :

• If put the pass-through drive on the IDE controller, I can see it in the Guest.
• If put the storage drive 'Online' in the host and create a VHD on it on the SCSI controller, I can see it in the Guest. I suppose I could create a fixed-size VHD that consumes the entire disk, but I'd rather not have that overhead.
• I've also extracted the contents of the Integration Tools drivers (x86 and amd64) and tried pointing the disk controller to each of those, with no luck.

Can anyone offer suggestions as to how I can get this to work properly?

I'm having some difficulties exposing a standard windows file share on a Windows Embedded Standard 2009 device that is running Symantec Endpoint Protection Agent 5.1.

I'm using simply file sharing to expose a particular directory. That share is visible locally on the machine and externally visible when I disable the endpoint protection agent.

I've added a rule (and moved it to the to ensure priority) allowing all hosts access on TDP ports 137,138,138,445 and another rule allowing UDP access on ports 137,138,139. When I try to connect, two endpoint protection dialogs pop up saying:

Traffic has been blocked from this application: NWLINK2 IPX Protocol Driver (nwlnkipx.sys)
Traffic has been blocked from this application: IPv6 driver (tcpip6.sys)

I'm not using IPv6 anywhere.

Interestingly, I discovered a workaround in that I can white-list all traffic from the subnet the device is on, which meets my needs, but I'm still curious as to why my original approach wasn't successful.

Can anyone suggestion a reason why the above endpoint protection rules won't allow me to access windows file shares on the device?

After freshly installing Windows Storage Server 2008, you're presented with a login screen where the system installation process hasn't prompted you for any kind of a password.

What's the default password for Windows Storage Server 2008?

I'm considering setting up a software-based iSCSI SAN on my home network. I'm looking at this because I've got two VM servers running and would like a common, easily managed storage pool rather than managing each VM server separately.

What I'd like know is... are there real benefits to using multiple NICs in each of the servers that would be comprise the iSCSI LAN. I'm thinking of having four gigabit PCI* adapters in the iSCSI server and two in each of the VM servers. (For the purposes of this question, lets assume that disk access will not be the limiting bottleneck.) All eight ports would be connected to the same unmanaged gigabit (consumer-grade) switch which would only have iSCSI traffic. (Assume there's a separate LAN for regular traffic.)

Is there a point to setting up the hardware this way? Will I actually see a reasonable increase in the available speed?

*I say PCI because the storage server will only have PCI slots available.

(edit - I'm not concerned with redundancy in this scenario.. simply getting the highest bandwidth possible out of the hardware)

I'm considering setting up a software-based iSCSI environment for some development/test VMs. Some of the research that I've done has lead me to StarWind's Free iSCSI product.

I was all happy since it seemed to fit my needs nicely (remember, this isn't a production setup) and was starting to install it last night.

However, I've read more than a few posts today talking about StarWind that seemed to be frank, quite spammy. This is leading me to question some of my initial research.

Is anyone actually using the StarWind Free or enterprise products? What have your experiences been, and would you recommend a similar solution for a test or development environment? (ie, probably at most two servers consuming the iSCSI targets..)

(I can provide more info about my intended usage scenarios, but I just wanted to get some high-level opinions of StarWind before I got much further...also, note that a hardware-based solution isn't an option due to budget..)