Windows 10: Thinking about converting from VMW to HV

Good morning all.

I am currently running a laptop with W7 & VMware workstation running several W7 and Linux guests.

I have a rebuild coming up soon (more accurately, a replacement), and am thinking about converting my workload to the built-in Hyper-V when it comes along. I'm also debating modernizing my VMs as well.

So a few questions:
1) One of my key needs is host-shared folders that can be shared to one-or-all of the VMs (both Linux and Windows). Is Hyper-V capable of this?
1A) If it's capable, I assume there's some sort of agent I need to install on my Linux guests to support this, true?

2) Is a Hyper-V host capable of p2ving itself, given enough external storage? I'd rather use my new laptop as the starting point for all of my new VMs rather than having to rebuild them all from scratch. Licensing is not an issue.
2A) Is it capable of smartly reducing disk either during or after? Or is there another way of solving that issue? If I get a 1TB drive - that'll be mostly empty, just fine for holding several smaller VMs, but if I can't shrink the source 1TB to a reasonable size, that'll be a dead path.

Thanks,
-v

:)

 

No avi Xvid support?

My understanding is that the problem isn't so much with .avi as with resizing. To convert an MPEG4 Part 2 ASP encoded .avi movie to .vmw or whatever doesn't require reencoding, you need remuxing, which takes a minute or so. While it would be better without
it (after all, .avi is a Microsoft format!), resizing is CPU intensive (and should be unnecessary).

 

N79 Calculator

Hi,

Any1 know if i can hv the currency converter in the calculator?

My current phone do not have that function. It's like a very basic calculator.

 

I tried Hyper-V with Linux and i found that if you need a graphical interface the experience is quite bad (very sluggish),
not so bad if you only run Linux in command line mode, although the networking speed may not be optimal.

Notice that i'm not in any way an "hyper-V expert" so if you gain better result it may be interesting to know how

thanks.

 

Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, which means that it runs directly on the system hardware (yes, even Hyper-V on Windows 10 is a type 1 hypervisor). This means it will be faster, but also means that it will support less features vs a type 2 hypervisor, such as hardware accelerations and so on, as this runs on top of an OS.

Regarding your questions:
1) You can share your folders, just create an Internal Virtual Switch with a different subnet and use SMB or other protocol of your choice. Once again, Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, which means it won't talk directly with Windows, like VirtualBox for example.

1A) You can share you files/folders using SAMBA and an Internal Virtual Switch for example, just share all the folders on the network and that's it.

2) By p2ving you mean virtualizing your laptop? Yes it's possible. You can use software like Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional and create a VHDX and load it on a Hyper-V virtual machine.

2A) You can auto size and it will only fill what it needs.

 

One limitation with Hyper-V which may be an issue is if guest does not support rdp servers (10 Home and virtually all non Windows VMs), they can only be run in basic mode which gives following distinct disadvantages:

1) You cannot share a host drive directly for use on Host and VM at same time. This means you cannot see the host C drive as it cannot be taken offline.

You can however get round this by using Network Shares, just more effort.

2) It is more difficult to use usb drives on vm.

3) Most important perhaps as there is afaik no way round this is that you do not get any sound.

None of the above apply in enhanced mode, which is only for Windows VMs (apart from Home).

When you can use an enhanced mode vm on hyper-v, it is definitely superior, but hyper-v does have weaknesses as well as above.

 

Hyper-v can talk directly with Windows in enhanced mode making sharing of drives very easy.

Windows has its own tool - disktovhd for virtualising host pc.

A great way of doing above is to install Macrium Reflect Free with Viboot where you can create an image backup of host and run as a vm in hyper-v.