w00t! I can keep Hyper-V after all!

I can keep Hyper-V after all! How did I get back Client for Microsoft Networking do you ask?

In my intarweb searchings I came across this blog entry.

Here is the solution in a nutshell.

Blow away any pre-existing virtual NICs with the Hyper-V manager. With your physical NIC go ahead and un-bind all protocols. Once that is done, go back into Hyper-V manager and re-create a virtual NIC and viola, you'll have a virtual NIC with Client for Microsoft Networks bound. Just reboot your machine and it should be good to go.

Back to using Hyper-V for prototyping! Yay!

Thanks, Jeff! You rock!

Thinkin' about ditching Hyper-V

Seriously thinking about ditching Hyper-V for it's smaller brother, Virtual PC 2007. Sure, Virtual PC doesn't give the VM as much horsepower or as much contact with the metal of the host machine but by golly gosh the networking doesn't try to kill off Client for Microsoft Network.

I'm sure Hyper-V works great in the intended role of hosting guest VMs while racked in a server room someplace but the network issue that I am having is really irking me. Perhaps Hyper-V isn't ready for the type of prototyping work I want to do and Virtual PC 2007 will gimp along for my prototyping work.

Of course, the only issue that I have so far is that I have four VMs created and I'd have to go through all that trouble of reloading the OS. Well, I'm just about done with my load balancing prototyping so blowing away the VMs and removing the Hyper-V role wouldn't be that painful...

Of course, the biggest thing that I'd miss is the snapshot feature of Hyper-V. For prototyping and messin' around with a VM that is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I don't suspect we'll see that in a free Virtual PC anytime soon...

Hyper-V Networking Problems

I encountered some "interesting" situations with Hyper-V networking last night. For some reason I've lost the ability to connect to network shares on my machine, not good. I poke around and find for some reason that "Client for Microsoft Networks" is disabled on the Hyper-V virtual NIC. WTF?

I try to re-enable it and get the strange error message of "Your current selection will also disable the following features: Client for Microsoft Networks"

Uh, no? I'm trying to re-enable.

It appears that I am not the only person that has had this issue:

http://sqlsolace.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html

I disabled the Hyper-V virtual NIC and re-established my physical NIC and am able to truck on down the road. I find that if I delete the Hyper-V virtual NIC (external network connection) and create an internal virtual network (no physical connection) that the internal network has Client for Microsoft Network without issue. It's only the external virtual connections that are bjorked.

In the blog post above they said that if they un-installed all protocols and clients, reboot, and then re-installed that it was a work around. What a PITA. I haven't tried that yet as I got my Ubuntu 8.04 TLS installation up and running with HAProxy load balancing to two Win2k3 VMs which for prototyping works just fine on an internal virtual network just fine.

I like HAProxy. It is pretty full featured for a free, open source L7 load balance tool. It has a lot of features that remind me of NetScaler boxes (HAProxy even has a FreeBSD port so you too can run your balancer under FreeBSD just like NetScaler, 'cept of course it isn't NetSclaer).

I fired up my Win2k3 running NLB and the NLB manager shows both client machines to be up and running but it will only direct traffic to one of the Win2k3 VMs. Nice. And even niftier, if I ping the NLB cluster (in my case, it's 192.168.0.100) I will get back dupe pings as NLB creates the 192.168.0.100 VIP on both the NLB machine and all the client machines. Yeah, NLB is over kill for the stuff I want to do and HAProxy has nifty persistence support via cookies since it is a L7 balancer.

The only issue is that IIS logs the IP address of the HAProxy machine and not the actual client IP address. The HAProxy, much like the NetScaler product, sends the true IP in an X HTTP request header but you must use an ISAPI filter with IIS to log the true IP address to the IIS log. Apache has built in support for logging X-Header entries to the apache log. That is kinda handy but we aren't using apache. I've found some sample Visual C++ 6.0 ISAPI code for handling this task. Heck, I don't even have Visual Studio 6.0 installed or even Visual C++ 2008 installed on my machine.

Meh, not going to worry about it right now. Just suffice it to say that Hyper-V networking is irking me and NLB is ooky. HAProxy is pretty nifty and didn't take long to get a sample balancer up and running.

Hyper-V is nifty!

I haven't had much of a chance to play with Hyper-V but I did a little bit of fiddling tonight. I loaded up a VM with the latest Ubuntu and got it up and running and all is well with the world.

I made a snapshot and then did the classic n00b mistake of:

`cd / && rm -rf *`

Yeah. Not a good thing to do and yes, it destroyed the installation as expected.

I applied the snapshot that I had taken a few minutes before and within a few seconds my Ubuntu was up and running exactly the way it was when I took the snapshot. How stinkin' cool is that?

I have a need to build out an installation process that builds installs and configures a Win2k3 machine with users, applications, IIS, vdirs, etc and this will be the perfect environment to test. Build up a base machine, get it configured and snap shot.

Then I can try the process and tweak as much as a I need by restoring the snapshot. Too stinkin' cool!