My Experience Running the VSTS 2010 CTP under Hyper-V

The VSTS 2010 CTP uses quite a bit of horsepower, and had been really sluggish under Virtual PC or Virtual Server.  Hyper-V is a little more efficient, and I could add some of my second core to it as well, so I converted the image over.  I used Grant Holliday’s instructions for Converting VS2010 CTP to Hyper-V which I augmented from some more instructions from Cameron Skinner's post on the subject.

In the early stages of converting the image, I ran the image in Virtual Server, removed the Virtual PC Extensions, and ran through a few more steps before moving the virtual hard disk (VHD file) over to the Hyper-V server.  For some reason, the instructions by Brian Keller that I'd used weren’t “fully” working—the time was synchronizing between the host OS and the guest OS.  I just set the host OS time back a couple of months (to early December) and went forward with the conversion.

Then I ran into some weirdness when I attached the virtual hard drive to my Hyper-V server—I kept getting errors like “Could not initialize machine remoting system” and "an error occurred while attempting to change the state of virtual machine"  with an 0x80004005 error code.  After thinking that the hard drive was incompatible or somehow corrupted, I finally found some information in an outside FAQ—the Knowledge Layer Hyper-V FAQ.  The 19th item let me know that I had to restart my server. Once I did, I was up and running.

One of the nice features of Hyper-V is the ability to snapshot certain progress points.  I can easily roll back to a previous point now and restart from there.  It makes it very easy to experiment with something and abandon those changes.  I also makes it easy for me to work without being concerned about the virtual machine’s license timing out before a new VPC ships.  Hopefully, the next one will ship Hyper-V.