| Like a good Microsoft fanboy, I use their virtualization software. Until recently that's meant Virtual PC 2007 for demos on my laptop and Virtual Server 2005 R2 for a couple of servers at home. Now that Hyper-V is out and getting lots of attention I thought I'd better look into it. I have a lot of virtual machines. A lot. My laptop alone has 12 registered with Virtual PC with several more waiting in the wings. Any time I have something I want to test I fire up a new VM to do so. Because of this, several years I created a base virtual hard disk image I could use to get things started quickly. It has Windows Server 2003 with the most recent patches, a few tweaks I like and some software installed. It's also got scripts defined to automatically install IIS and SharePoint, things like that. I've been updating that image over time as more patches come out and so on. It's worked out really well until a couple of days ago. I was moving a couple of my VMs over to Hyper-V. I won't go into all of the details, but Hyper-V has some management irritations to it. Paul Thurrott goes over some of them in this blog post. One being getting the Hyper-V Manager on one machine to manager Hyper-V on another. The Hyper-V server I was accessing was not in the same domain as my Vista workstation, and for the life of me I couldn't get the two to get along, Hyper-V deficiency #1. I moved to Plan B; RDPing into the Hyper-V server to user Hyper-V Manager that way. That worked to get the VM imported and running. However, if you don't have the Hyper-V Integration installed in a guest then you can't capture the mouse if you're RDPed into the Hyper-V server; Hyper-V deficiency #2. Fortunately in this case I had physical access to the Hyper-V server, but that wouldn't always be possible in which case this story would have had a much sadder ending. I logged into the Hyper-V server and tried to installed the Hyper-V Integration only be greeted by a friendly message telling me the Integration can't be installed because Virtual PC additions were installed and that I needed to uninstall them first. While that was annoying, it was understandable. That is a feat that would have been nearly impossible without a mouse, which is why this story wouldn't have ended as well had I not had physical access. I jumped into Control Panel to uninstall the Virtual Machine additions. While doing that I was greeted with another error message telling me that the installer needed the location of file 1. Yeah, just 1. No extension, nothing. Just 1. To the mortal man this might have seemed like the end of the story, after a fit of swearing. How do you search for the fix for an error when the file is "1?" Fortunately I had seen this before, last year at TechEd EMEA. Shane Young and I were working on a session and my VM wasn't resizing correctly. Shane suggested that I reinstall the Additions to get the video straightened out. I got the same error then. Shane and I were able to scour the Internet and find the fix. (funny how deadlines will do that) The problem pops up if the VM ever had the Virtual PC 2004 Additions (version 13.306 in Control Panel) on it. Which my VMs all did. When I created my base image years ago it was on Virtual PC 2004. Of course I had upgraded the VPC Additions to VPC 2007, but the installer doesn't update it correctly. To uninstall the VPC additions you have to do it with the VPC 2004 install, not the VPC 2007 one that everyone has handy. I chased down the VPC 2004 install and pointed Control Panel at the MSI for it, no dice. I tried running the MSI manually, nothing. Next I tried mounting the ISO file that has the VPC 2004 additions on it, the way VPC does when it installs them. That took off and looked like it was going to work. Then another friendly error message popped up. Seems the VPC 2004 additions won't install unless they're in a VPC. Hyper-V doesn't look virtual enough for it, so it bombs out. I can't really blame this on Hyper-V, but I'm going to anyway; Hyper-V deficiency #3. I moved the VM back to VPC 2007, mounted up the VPC 2004 additions ISO and was able to remove them. Then when I moved the VM over to Hyper-V the Integration installed and everything was happy in Toddville.
The story part is pretty long winded, so here's the Reader's Digest condensed version of how to fix this problem:
- Download Virtual PC 2004 SP1
- Unzip it
- Extract the files with msiexec /a Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 MSDN.msi
- Find VMAdditions.iso in Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions
- In Virtual PC 2007 (this will not work in Hyper-V) mount VMAdditions.iso and run the install
- Reboot your VM
- If you're going to run this VM in Hyper-V copy the files over to your Hyper-V server and import it. The Hyper-V Integration should install now
- If you're going to run this VM in Virtual PC 2007 or some other virtualization software, load the VM in it and install their tools
Hyper-V, I've got my eye on you. You'd better straighten up and fly right, or I'm going to install VirtualBox.
tk
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