Recertified, Un-moused, and Port-holed

You can't believe just how fast a year goes by. It seems like only yesterday I was rebooting all the Hyper-V virtual machines because the server certificate for Hyper-V had expired. And now it's gone and done it again.

The certificate is renewed automatically, but it disconnects the VMs when it does this. Which causes the mouse pointer to go off and hide, and you can see only a quarter of the screen in the VM connection afterwards. Trying to do all that UI stuff without a mouse is hard enough, but doing it at the same time as looking though a tiny porthole, where you can't see most of the screen, is even harder.

However, rebooting all the VMs is something I try to avoid. OK, so I usually have to do it each month for patch Tuesday (or twice this month with the out-of-band update for Internet Explorer). A reboot all round is a pain because the virtual domain controller can't re-sync Active Directory until I boot up the cold-swap backup DC (one day I'll figure a way round having physical DCs). And the server that interfaces with my weather station and the solar panel inverter gets confused and has to reload all its readings.

So, this year, I decided there must be a better (and quicker) way to regain control of my VMs. And there is. As described in https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2413735, you just save the VM and then restart it. I'm sure I've tried this before without success, but it worked this year. Perhaps one of the patch Tuesday updates to Hyper-V changed something inside.

But maybe I should be upgrading to Server 2012 instead. I still have 2008 R2 on most VMs, and even one running Server 2003 (it was two until I got rid of ISA Server). According to a blog post I read this week I have only 450 days of support before Server 2003 reaches end-of-life. Maybe when I get a free week I can look forward to a holiday in the server cabinet.

Or retire from work and give up computing instead...