Thursday, January 16, 2014

Working with Hyper-V on windows 8

I love the new Hyper-V integration on window 8 and I think I will not be able to switch to another version unless there is a Hyper-V support! I have been working lately on multiple dev environments thanks to the virtualization capabilities of win8 and this is a quick guide on how I organize my work environments.



First and foremost, you need to work on the VM using remote desktop. Copy paste capabilities are not yet implemented in the Hyper-V console. Thus you have to set a password to the VM’s account (otherwise you won’t be allowed to connect) and enable remote desktop connections from system properties (right click on My Computer and click the Properties tab on Win XP, or right click on My Computer and click Remote Settings on windows vista and 7 or right click on the area where the old start button used to be and click System and then the same as win 7).

Moreover, you might want to consider the autologin feature that is hidden on windows.

In case you do have ipsec policies for public or unidentified networks, you might want to see how to change an unidentified network to private in order to access the VM's web server.

Checkpoints is a really great feature. I have a virtual machine with multiple browsers and I have checkpoints to go back to previous ones and test web sites with older versions.

Another issue you might have to tackle, is the limited storage of the ssd drives. A typical development laptop with 256 Gb hard disk doesn’t have the space to host more than 5 full blown servers. This is where usb3 external disks come in handy. Instead of going to the standard external usb 3 disks, you might want to consider the case of buying an external case and then buy a solid state disk to put inside. You will definitely spot the difference, and the cost difference is not that big.

That's all I can think of right now, but I might update this list if I remember something.

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