Booting to a VHD in Windows 7

This is something I tried before but didn’t complete for some reason. Now that I’m on vacation this week and I’ve got some extra time to play, I went back to finish it.

As you probably know by now, Windows 7 has the ability to boot into a .vhd file. This is awesome, as you can create a virtual testing environment that you can run directly against you hardware.

There are a few gotchas, though. You’re limited in the OS’s you can run on the virtual side to Windows 7 and Windows 2008. I’ve seen post of people getting other OS’s to run but I haven’t tried. And I’ve seen warnings not to do this on a laptop, though I’ll try it, once I install my new bigger laptop hard drive next week.

Anyway, this is how I did it. I had created a Windows 7 virtual machine in Virtual PC 2007. I used the vhd from that VM instead of creating a new one, though you certainly could if you wanted to.

The first thing I did was to run sysprep inside my VM. I’m not an expert on sysprep, I just followed instructions I found on the web. Briefly, sysprep is a GUI tool that prepares the image to be configured to use the hardware on the new server. You’ll find it in C:\Windows\system32\sysprep. Run it as an admin. Choose the default target of out of the box experience and also choose to generalize. Also choose to shut down. After sysprep is finished it will power down your VM.

I didn’t do this, but it’s probably a good idea to make a copy of the vhd at this point.

The next thing I did was to set up Windows bootloader to see the vhd file. I opened a admin command prompt and ran the following: bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Win 7 VHD”. This returns a GUID I saved to notepad. “Win 7 VHD” is the description I wanted to see on the boot menu. After that I ran these three commands:

bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd=[C:]\VM\Win7\Win7.vhd

bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd=[C:]\VM\Win7\Win7.vhd

bcdedit /set {guid} detecthal on

In my example I replaced guid with the guid I saved earlier. VM\Win7\ is the path to my vhd file, and Win7.vhd is the file I’m using. Note that the drive letter is in square brackets: [C].    

And that’s just about it. Once I restarted my computer I could see both my original Windows 7 installation and my new vhd boot option. When I chose the vhd, Windows started and applied the hardware changes. After that I just logged in and ran my Windows vhd. Once in the virtual environment, I can see all the drives on the computer, including those for my “real” Windows 7. Notice Disk 1 is a blue icon; this shows that it’s a vhd file. It also shows the reserved system partition. I can also see the files on the other physical drives.

I don’t get this if I’m running my physical Windows 7. I can mount the vhd file (on the menu go to Action > Attach VHD). But it doesn’t stay mounted between reboots. I haven’t tried mounting it with DISKPART yet, I’ll try that when I create my laptop VM.

 

The only drawback is the vhd is not portable, and I can’t run it in Virtual PC 2007 anymore. I can probably run sysprep again to get it back, but I think I’ll keep it as it is for now.

Year End Wrap-up

This is my wrap-up for 2009 and a preview for 2010.

A big chunk of my year was testing virtualizing our production servers with different configurations. After months of testing we learned that our workload wasn’t conducive to virtualization.

During the last few months I began testing SnapManager from IBM for use as a backup tool. While SnapManager is a great tool for bringing a server online quickly, I can’t see a way of restoring individual objects. Unfortunately in our shop it’s far more likely to have a table accidentally updated or deleted than have a whole database go corrupt. I’d like to find a way for both to work, having the best of both worlds.

I started to learn Microsoft’s BI stack. I’m already pretty familiar with Reporting Services, but I’ve only played around with Integration Services and I’ve done nothing with Analysis Services. So far I’ve just scheduled a simple package to collect database sizes so I can track growth. I’ve got a long way to go.

I’m on vacation this week, not going back to work until January 4th. I’m using my downtime to create a virtual Win 7 pc to run all the 2010 betas coming down. I also want to set it so I can boot directly to it, using the new functionality in Windows 7.

So what’s coming up next year?

• I’ll finish my testing of SnapManager and I’ll post my results.
• I’m going to attend the first SQL Saturday in the Chicago area in April. I’ll post info about this early next month.
• Continue my education into BI using the SQL tools.

One of my resolutions for next is to continue studying new technologies – new to me that is. I want to become more proficient in Powershell and Silverlight, among others.

Happy holidays to all, and I’ll see you next year.

Virtualization – final wrapup

This is another topic I want to wrap up before the end of the year.

A quick overview. earlier this year, I did some testing of virtualizing our production servers hosted on VMWare servers. I captured a typical workload from our busiest server and replayed it on servers set up for testing; a 32-bit physical server with 16 CPU set up as a production server, the same server with hyper threading turned off, a 32-bit and a 64-bit virtual server with 4 CPUs,and a 32-bit and a 64-bit virtual server using vSphere and 8 CPUs. All servers had 16 GB of RAM.

After running the workload multiple times on each server configuration we compared results. What we saw was understandable – neither the 4 CPU or 8 CPU servers matched the 16 core baseline. Even the physical server with HT off fell short.

What I didn’t show in earlier posts was the counter for latches. Latches are the #1 wait type on our servers, and this held true on all testing servers. Our servers aren’t running optimized and this is being magnified in a virtual environment. Having 16 cores lessens the performance hit from all those latches in production.

So we’re not going to virtualize,at least the production servers. While virtualization is useful and can be used for SQL, it’s not a good idea to try and virtualize servers with performance problems. We’re currently using VMWare to run our development and testing environments as well as a few smaller, less used SQL servers, and we’re not seeing any issues with them.

I’m not going to published a summary of all my counters, but I’ll make them available on request if anyone is interested.

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