Importing Microsoft Virtual PC/Server images in Windows 2008 Hyper-V
I normally work with Virtual PC 2007 on my laptop and workstation doing a lot of infrastructure testing and developing while using multiple types of Operating Systems. I’m running Windows 2008 RTM with Hyper-V beta on my Quad-Core system with 8GB of memory for two months now. Performance is better than expected especially with Windows 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 guests! There must have been a lot of tweaking on these two Operating Systems for them to work so smoothly as a guest on Hyper-V. Only performance of mounted ISO’s as Virtual DVD/CD drive is a bit slow on the current version (RC0) of Hyper-V.
Other thing I tried was importing an Virtual PC 2007 Virtual Machine into Hyper-V and it worked! Something that is to important to do before you do this, is uninstalling the “Virtual Machine Additions”. This is because when you have the machine up and running on Hyper-V, you need to install the Hyper-V Integration Services. These won’t install when the Virtual PC “VM Additions” are installed.
The steps to get an Virtual PC/Server VM to work on Hyper-V are as following:
- Uninstall Virtual Machine Additions on specific VM
- Copy VM to Hyper-V Machine (only VHD file)
- Create a new Virtual Machine in Hyper-V Management Console (Hyper-V does not work with Virtual PC/Server VPC Files)
- Select and Point to existing Virtual Harddisk (VHD file of the specific VM)
- Boot the VM
- Install Integration Services
