- Posted by justin on January 19, 2007
I love Virtual PC/Server. The biggest problem I have is the size of the images. They tend not to be very portable.
from: Getting a Small Virtual PC Image - WinXP Pro in 550MB
Tools: TweakUI, XPlite ($40), CCleaner, defrag, VM Optimizer
Steps to a Small VPC
- Install Windows XP Pro SP2
- Install all Windows Updates
- Follow steps 3. to 6. (first group) then steps 1, 2, & 3 (second group) in here
- Follow steps 1. to 11. (first group) in here
- Complete w/ steps 4, 5, 6 (second group) in here
- Posted by justin on January 17, 2007
I am a huge fan of Virtual PC/Server and have run across issues several times in the past with the having the virtual network drivers all of a sudden stop working. I ran across the blog post below the other day on how to fix the problem.
From: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/01/15/fixing-broken-virtual-networking.aspx
Number 1: The Virtual Machine Network Services driver is installed but not enabled. To fix this:
On a Windows XP system you’ll need to:
- Open the Start menu and click on Control Panel.
- Click on Network and Internet Connections and then Network Connections.
If you are using classic mode you just need to double click on Network Connections.
- Locate your network adapter, right click on it and select Properties.
- Check the Virtual Machine Network Services entry and click OK.
On a Windows Vista system you’ll need to:
- Open the Start menu and click on Control Panel.
- Click on the Network and Internet and then Network and Sharing Center.
If you are using classic mode you just need to double click on Network and Sharing Center.
- Click on Manage network connections, in the task list on the left side of the window.
- Locate your network adapter, right click on it and select Properties.
You’ll need to approve this action.
- Check the Virtual Machine Network Services entry and click OK.
Number 2: The Virtual Machine Network Services driver is installed and enabled, but does not seem to be working. To fix this you'll need to:
- Follow the steps for the first solution to get to the properties display for your network adapter.
- Select the Virtual Machine Network Services entry, and click Uninstall.
- Reboot the physical computer (this step is critical)
- Return to the properties display for your network adapter.
- Click Install…
- Select Service and click Add…
- Select the Virtual Machine Network Services entry and click OK.
- Posted by justin on October 12, 2005
One of the developers on my team is having constant issues with her VPC locking/pausing up for a second or two. It is almost like the video is not updating because if you keep typing during the lock up it will show up in the vpc when it starts working again. She has a T42 with a standard IT build, 1 gig of memory and a single hard drive. Does anybody have any ideas of why the virtual pc keeps doing this?
- Posted by justin on October 12, 2005
In previous posts I have mentioned that I am using Virtual PC with shared networking and while this setup typically works great, I have found issues when connected through vpn. Every so often the DNS name resolution fails to work so I can not get to any machine/web site by name. To get around this issue, I have hard coded the DNS server values for both and work into the network adapter for the virtual pc image. To get the dns server ip address for home, I logged into my wireless router and grab the dns servers for my isp. To get the dns server ip address for work, I open up a command prompt and use the ipconfig/all command.
After I set the dns servers in the virtual pc I have not had any more problems with not being able to resolve server names.
- Posted by justin on October 10, 2005
I decided to consolidate the Virtual PC tips post that I have made lately.
Differencing Disk:
- Will greatly save on disk space.
- Remember to make base image read-only as making changes to it, may/most likely will render any child images unusable.
Performance Tuning
- Tell WinXp/2003 to tune for best performance instead of letting windows decide.
- It is best to have the virtual hard disk on a 2nd hard drive, this way the host OS and guest OS are not fighting for disk I/O.
- Defrag both the host OS and guest OS.
- Close as many applications on the host os as possible when running the virtual pc. If you don’t need Outlook open or SQL Server running on the host OS, then close outlook and turn off SQL Server.
- Don't allocate too much memory to the virtual pc. a 50/50 split on the laptop seems to work pretty good.
- You will want at least 1 gig of memory on the host computer to get a decent performance from Virtual PC.
- Turn off the Virtual PC sound, serial ports, floppy disk, and any other device that you are not going to be using.
Image Sizing
Virus Scan
- Virus Scan engines are not able to actually scan the virtual hard disk for virus. Therefore it is best to install a virus scanner on the guest OS and tell the host OS virus scanner to ignore the Virtual PC files. http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/09/14/466291
- The one change from the web site I would make it to specify the exact files to ignore instead of just the extensions. If is safer that way.
Virtual Machine Additions
- Make to always install the additions. They include stability and performance enhancements that greatly increase the usability of virtual pc.
Service Packs
- There is a sevice pack 1 for both Virtual Pc and Virtual Server. You will want to install both of these service packs.
Additional Links:
- Posted by justin on October 10, 2005
Microsoft announced some significant licensing changes with regards to virtualization and Windows Server 2003:
(1) Starting with Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition - customers can run up to 4 virtual instances of Windows Server 2003 (any edition) with no additional licensing costs. Zero, nil. Additionally, If you purchase Datacenter Edition of Windows Server, you can have unlimited virtual machines - still at no additional cost. Pretty cool, huh?
(2) Some of the Windows Server System products are licensed by the processor. (BizTalk, SQL, Etc) When these technologies are run in a virtual machine, you only need to license for the virtual processors being used rather than for the physical processors in the host computer.
(3) You can move active instances of a virtual instance from one computer to another without limitation. This will allow, for example, a virtual image that is stored on a SAN to be deployed to any server with available resources and licenses.
(4) To compliment the above scenario, licensing only counts towards the number of actually running virtual instances that are running. This will allow customers to store as many dormant images as needed.
So why is Microsoft doing all of this? Customer Ease. They wanted their licensing regarding virtualization to remove any potential barriers to customers using Virtual Server 2005. The best way they found to do this was to remove the licensing confusion and limitations and change the licensing to reflect how their customers actually use Virtualization Technologies.
Does these licensing changes apply only to Virtual Server 2005. No - you can use any virtualization technology that you want.
You can ready the full announcement here
- Posted by justin on October 5, 2005
For those that have used Virtual PC before, you know how the vhd size can get pretty big in size. I had one development image that we almost 8 gigs in size and it made it hard for remote developers to download the image. You have been able to compact the virtual hard disk for sometime now but until the sp1 release, it did not shrink the vhd very far. With the sp1 release, Microsoft included a precompact command line program. Using the instructions below, I was able to shrink an XP development image from 7.7 gigs to 4.7 gigs. One thing I did not do which may shrink it even more is to defrag the vpc hard drive before running precompat.
Instructions:
- To use the precompact command line, you need to install the virtual machine additions first.
- Once that is done, you will need to capture the precompact iso (Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso) so that the precompat iso is mount to the cd drive. The iso is located in c:\C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions.
- The precompact application runs inside of the vpc. The run it, open a command line, navigate to the cd-rom drive (d:) and type precompact to compact all of the vhd files.
- After this is done, you will need to run the vpc virtual disk wizard, select edit an existing virtual hard disk, then select compact it.
- Posted by justin on July 21, 2005
I have been wanting a small external usb 2.0 hard drive for quite awhile. Today I finally find one at http://www.iomagic.com/gigabank/giga.asp .
Update: I actually ended up getting a portable drive from seagate (http://www.seagate.com/products/personal/portable/index.html). I got to the store and they had this drive right next to the iogear. Since seagate is a well-known brand I thought I would at least look at it. The thing that sold me on the seagate besides the brand name was that it has an 8mb buffer and was a 100 GB instead of 80GB for only 30 dollars more. I am going to be testing the drive over the next week or so. My main goal is to use this drive to run my virtual server images plus I was tired of the size/weight of my external maxtor drive.