Tag: Hyper-V

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Hyper-V enable Nested Virtualization

Hyper-V supports nested virtualization, yes, even on Window 10.
How do you go about enabling this? The official documentation gives you a very good explanation:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/user-guide/nested-virtualization

Want a quick summary instead? Throw the following commands in Powershell:

Set-VMProcessor -VMName <VMName> -ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $true
Get-VMNetworkAdapter -VMName <VMName> | Set-VMNetworkAdapter -MacAddressSpoofing On

This simply enables nested virtualization for your VM and fixes the networking (enables MAC address spoofing, so no NAT etc, just a bridge).

And disable dynamic RAM for your VM, it won’t work. The doc say so and it prevented my test VM to boot.

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VMware workstation + Hyper-V

Just a small announcement:

VMware workstation 15.5 is now compatible with Hyper-V of Windows 10 build 19041.264 (probably and up)!

Which means, to get it working you’ll have to update your windows to the latest patch level, which may not have been rolled out in your region yet. If so, the update assistant can be found here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

The VMware workstation pro release can be downloaded at VMware and accepts your current Workstation pro license. It can be found here:

https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-pro.html

Which means you can run Hyper-V, VMware Workstation and WSL2 on your Windows 10 desktop! (But you don’t want to see the pile of network adapters it created, I’m currently at 18 items in the network connections screen.)

And concerning WSL, you can convert your WSL1 distro to WSL2 and take all your work with you. Only thing that I’ve discovered to be broken was my X-forwarding setup, but that’s to be expected.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10#set-your-distribution-version-to-wsl-1-or-wsl-2

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Windows 2019 VM activation

So what have I been up to lately?

I’ve been taking a look at Windows Server, once again. Normally I do all my experimenting etc on Linux. But now I got the ability to use some Windows server 2019 datacenter licenses, so why not give it a try an deploy a small Windows cluster?
Ofcourse the hardware of choice are beefed HP T620 Thin Clients.

After deploying Hyper-V, I discovered Windows has this interesting thing called VM activation. I was always wondering how retail keys behaved when you enter them in your VMs, turns out you don’t. I never gave it a thought while deploying Volume license keys over VMware infrastructures, but turns out that on Hyper-V your host can license the guest!

More about this can be found on the following page:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started-19/vm-activation-19

But it basically boils down to this command prompt command (Windows 2019 datacenter):

slmgr /ipk YOUR-WINDOWS-VERSION-KEY-HERE

Activation status can be checked with:

slmgr /dlv

Fyi, more info on slmgr can be found here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/activation-slmgr-vbs-options